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COPmiGHT DEPOSIT. 



The MacDonell Lectures for 1921 Delivered 
before Scarritt Bible and Training School 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 
WILLIAM J. YOUNG, D.D. 



The MacDonell Lectures 

The Woman's Missiotiary Council of the Methodist 
Church, South, in annual session, April, 19 19, estab- 
lished a lecture course to be knoum as the MacDonell 
Lectures, in honor of Mrs. Robert W. MacDonell, who 
rendered distinguislied service in tlie field of home 
missions during a period of tweniy-five years of 
official connection with the Woman's Home Mission- 
ary Society, the Woman's Missionary Council and tJie 
Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Cimrch, 
South. 

According to the terms of the Lectureship the fund 
provided by the Home Department of the Wonmn's 
Missio}iary Council "shall be used each year to engage 
the services of a godly man or woman of wide ex- 
perience, recognised ability and spiritiuil power, wlw 
shall give a series of lectures to the students of the 
Scarritt Bible and Training School. The aim of the 
course shall be the enrichment and deepening of the 
spiritual life of the students in tJue Training School 
and otJier workers connected with tJie Council. A 
call to life service as an aim in tliese lectures is not 
to be overlooked." 

The first series of MacDonell Lectures was given 
in tlie spring of 1 920, by Rev. Oszvald Eugene Brown, 
D.D., of the School of Religion, Vanderbilt Univer- 
sity, and was published under the title, "The Christian- 
ization of American Life." The second series was 
delivered by Rev. Wm. J. Young, D.D., Professor of 
Missiotis, Emory University, under tlie general 
theme, ''The Suprejne Hottr of the Suprane Quest of 
the Sold." The splendid message is now, in tlte present 
volume, given to the Church at large, with the prayer 
that it may be abundantly used to stimulate and guide 
the Church in the Supreme Quest. 



WHEN GOD AND 
MAN MEET 

The Supreme Hour of 
The Supreme Quest of the Soul 



BY 

WILLIAM J. YOUNG, D.D. 

PKOFESSOR OF MISSIONS,' EMORY UNIVERSITY 




NEW ^ar^ YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



^"i 



i,"' 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET. I 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

©CUG83679 



FOREWORD 

In the summer of 1920 the author was invited to 
conduct the devotional hour at noon each day during 
the two weeks of the school for the training of Sun- 
day School teachers, which is held every year at Juna- 
luska, North Carolina. The addresses delivered on 
that occasion were very graciously received, and led 
to the request that, using the thoughts at that time 
presented, he deliver the MacDonell lectures at the 
Scarritt School of Missions in Kansas City, and the 
same lectures on the Bennett-Gibson foundation to the 
missionaries and others in Brazil. They were at both 
places blessed, far beyond the expectation of the lec- 
turer, to the profit of the hearers. 

The native Brazilians expressed a desire to have the 
lectures in the Portuguese language. They have been 
translated by a competent scholar, and will be pub- 
lished simultaneously in the United States and in 
Brazil. 

The author sincerely prays that the lectures may be 
a blessing to larger audiences in both lands, and may 
quicken the devotional life of many, and make the way 
plain into the presence of God. 

W. J. Young. 

Emory University, Georgia, 



CONTENTS 

LBCTURB PAGB 

I THE QUEST AND THE HOUR II 

II THE MUTUAL SURRENDER I GOD AND OURSELVES . 59 

III THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP IO3 

IV THE APPOINTED HOURS AND THE APPOINTED 

PLACES 145 

V THE JOYS OF WORSHIP . I9I 

VI THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE IN THE HOURS OF 

WORSHIP 237 



Lecture I 
THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 



WHEN GOD AND 
MAN MEET^ 

Lecture I 
THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

DURING the few days we spend together, I shall 
ask you to meditate with me upon The Supreme 
Hoiir of the Supreme Quest of the Soul. While we 
meditate upon this theme, let us pray that the God 
whom we seek may make himself known to us more 
richly than before. 

The subject of the present lecture is The Quest and 
the Hour. 

The quest of which I speak is the quest for God. 
We are all searchers after the mysteries , which lie 
hidden behind the passing show. We cannot help 
ourselves. For this we were made. The supreme 
search is for God, the cause, the final cause of all 
things, God in whom we and all things and beings 
else live and move and have their being. The myster- 
ies are only another name for God, before we have 
found him, and even after we have found him, for our 
discovery of him is ever an enlarging discovery here, 
and will no doubt be equally so in the other world. 

There are hours in all lives when it would be a 

[II] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

joy to surrender every knowledge, every possession 
if only we might see God by such surrender. The 
scene of the wrestling Jacob has been repeated 
thousands of times. The deepest cry of Job's heart 
when his anguish was the greatest, is found in those 
truly pathetic words, "Oh, that I knew where I might 
find him! That I might come even unto his seat!" 
The disciples, who, by their constant fellowship, had 
found the best in themselves aroused under the shadow 
of the Cross, presented as their supreme petition, 
"Show us the Father and it sufficeth us." It is God 
we want. It is God we must have. It is God we 
must know. 

The supreme hour of this quest is the hour of wor- 
ship. This is the hour which we have set apart for 
this very purpose. Elsewhere and at other times 
incidentally and impliedly we may be seeking God, 
but now all else is incidental and indeed auxiliary to 
this. Indeed the soul who has often found God be- 
fore, may in these holiest moments have all else but 
God vanish from his life and thought. 

I do not forget how often these hours of worship 
mean nothing, perhaps at times to the best of men. 
Not infrequently we go through them as we do other 
things which have become to us a fixed habit. We 
feel uncomfortable if we do not discharge such duties, 
but further than this they have no meaning to us. Or 
our acts of worship partake of the nature of fetichism 
or magic. They degenerate into the lowest form of 
the ex opere operate theory of the Romanist. The 
primitive man, with all his primitive superstitions, it 

[12] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

may be quite unconsciously to ourselves, once more 
asserts himself in us. Perhaps we are afraid not to 
worship. To many God has become a jealous God 
in the sense that he demands of us such flattery as 
an oriental monarch of the olden days demanded. 
Then too, it is entirely possible for us to imagine we 
are engaged in sincere worship, because we use the 
phrases which have become common in prayer and 
praise. 

Nevertheless it remains true that worship is the 
supreme act of the supreme hour of life. We may 
think of the failure to make proper use of such an 
extraordinary opportunity as dishonoring to God and 
withal very displeasing. We may think of possible 
consequences like those which ever flow from the 
trifling with the fundamental facts of God's universe. 
But we may remember and should not forget the 
certain damage to our character, the stripping from 
ourselves of the power of God, the robbing of our- 
selves of the wondrous peace found nowhere except in 
the conscious presence of God. How many can say 
as they sit in the churches of our land on the Lord's 
Day with the same thrill with which Jacob said it, 
"This is none other but the house of God, and this is 
the gate of heaven" ? 

The danger of losing the whole value of these most 
blessed of privileges is peculiarly great with those who 
stand related in any official way to any sort of public 
worship, or who feel it to be, just because of the posi- 
tion they occupy, a duty to observe stated hours or 
methods of worship. We may handle sacred things 

[13] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

and perform sacred acts, until they all become en- 
tirely commonplace, meaning no more than the most 
common things of daily life. But, on the other hand, 
there can be no higher honor, no loftier privilege, than 
the God-given ability to come constantly and fully 
into communion with God, and at the same time to 
lead others into this experience. The sermon may be 
eloquent and inspiring, while the worship is at the 
same time the merest form. It is not uncommon, how- 
ever, for men whose words are in themselves more 
than prosaic, so to lead the flock in prayer and praise 
and the reading of the Word, that the people feel all 
the while that they have met God face to face, and 
still find him as they go to their business or the other 
duties of life with their fatigue and monotony. 

All life is a search for God. The man of immense 
wealth still seeks for more because he is seeking — 
vainly enough indeed — to find himself at last the 
owner of an infinite treasure. In the same spirit and 
with the same largely unconscious aim Alexander and 
Caesar and Kaiser Wilhelm sought to govern the 
world. In music and poetry and art their faithful 
devotees are striving for the perfect harmony, the per- 
fect verse, the ideal beauty. It is very far from all 
the truth to say: 

"I wonder if ever a song was sung 

But the singer's heart sang sweeter. 
I wonder if ever a rhyme was rung, 

But the thought surpassed the meter. 
I wonder if ever a sculptor wrought, 
'Till the cold stone echoed his ardent thought; 
Or that ever a painter, with light and shade 
The thought of his inmost soul portrayed." 

[14] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

The scholar tells us that at the last he is a child 
wandering along the ocean shore, gathering shells that 
are borne in by the waves, and looking out upon the 
vast expanse of the sea. Yes, but he is not satisfied, 
until he has worked his way through all obstructions 
and gained for himself this perpetual vision. The 
agnostic will say that, after all his investigation, he 
has reached an impenetrable wall, which he is pleased 
to call the Unknowable. But he does not stop digging 
at the wall, and now and then he puts his ear against 
the adamantine structure, hoping that he may hear 
some sounds within. Sometimes faith comes to his 
rescue, as when Tyndall writes and speaks of the 
"Scientific Uses of the Imagination." In the best eth- 
ical ideals of earth's true heroes we see an utter dis- 
content with anything below the perfect life. In every 
case it is the lure of the infinite which draws men 
away from the ordinary walks and commonplace ex- 
periences of life. It is this Infinite which all the while 
(may we not say, 'Whom all the while") they yearn 
for and see afar as the goal of all their ambitions. 

The search for God is at the root of all religion, of 
all religions. Those are impressive words of the 
Mohammedan poet, Abdul Fazl, which he wrote at the 
command of the emperor Akbar, as an inscription for 
a temple in Kashmir : 

"O God, in every temple I see people that see thee, and in 
every language they praise thee. 

"If it be a mosque, men murmur the holy prayer, and 
if it be a Christian Church, they ring the bell from love 
to thee. 

"Sometimes I frequent the Christian cloister and some- 

[IS] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

times the mosque, but it is thou whom I seek from temple 
to temple. 

"Thine elect have no dealing with heresy or orthodoxy, 
for neither of these stands behind the screen of thy truth. 

"Heresy to the heretic and religion to the orthodox ! But 
the dust of the rose-petal belongs to the heart of the per- 
fume seller." 

We are reminded of Pope's well-known lines : 

"Father of all, in every age, 
By every clime adored, 
By saint, by savage, or by sage, 
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." 

There is a sense in which it might be said that there 
is and has been but one religion, while the various 
religions are but so many efforts to give expression to 
religion. Religion includes within itself a realization 
of a Power or Powers back of all things, a sense of 
dependence on that Power, the need of reconciliation 
with the Power, the devising and the use of some 
means by which to bring about that reconciliation. 
In Christianity alone are found the final interpretation 
and fulfillment of this one religion. It alone gives us 
the knowledge of the Power back of all things as a 
Person whom we are taught to call Father. It teaches 
us that the dependence upon him is the dependence of 
children upon a parent, that the need of reconciliation 
grows chiefly out of our sins, and that the only means 
of reconciliation is the atonement of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. 

The growth of culture, the progress in knowledge, 
the development of the scientific attitude toward all 
life and thought do not, as some have contended, 
destroy religion or make it useless. They give a 

[i6] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

larger vision of God and of his place in the world. 
They enlarge the sense of need and of dependence upon 
God. They add new meaning to the idea of reconcilia- 
tion, and give us a larger Christ to provide for our 
higher needs, and bring us to God. Indeed while re- 
ligion may change in many things external and second- 
ary, it is a part, the most important part (and inclusive 
of all the rest) of that which is fundamental and perma- 
nent in human life. We may repeat with confidence, 
"Heaven and earth shall pass away. But my words 
shall not pass away." 

The essential thing in religion, that without which 
it has no existence, is the thirst for God, as it finds 
its satisfaction in the Son of God incarnate. There 
are many things in the conduct of a church. It has 
grown in these days into a great business, handling 
many philanthropic interests and acting as the dis- 
tributing agent for large sums of money. The man- 
agement of the corporation demands large business 
skill and experience. When the congregation assem- 
bles on the Sabbath, the people find various things 
appealing to their fancy and their thought and making 
up the sum of the services. But these things are as 
valueless in themselves as the organ in the church with- 
out the air to fill the bellows. That business, that 
building, those services await the presence of God to 
give them meaning. The church is the dwelling-place 
of Jehovah. The people meet there in fellowship with 
one another, but they expect to meet God there, and 
only thus will their fellowship with one another be 
perfected. It too often happens that a congregation 

[17] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

Sabbath after Sabbath leaves the church without any 
profound sense of the presence of God, perfectly con- 
tent to have had a good attendance, a good sermon, 
good music, and a good collection. We need not won- 
der at the tendency to place the church in the position 
of secondary importance. 

This search for God, this perfect satisfaction of the 
soul in finding God, grow out of our likeness to God, 
a likeness to God which is the result of our relation 
to him as children. For exactly the same reason as 
we long for human companionship, and find it pos- 
sible not merely by speech, but by many other means, 
to hold communication with one another, do we long 
for God and find it possible to commune with him. 
On the one hand it was possible for God to come in 
human flesh, and on the other hand we may think 
God's thoughts after him. We speak with perfect 
propriety of the divinity of man, but also of the 
humanity of God. In Christ there dwelt "all the 
fullness of the Godhead bodily." At the same time 
we know that through all the ages holy men have 
spoken as they have been moved by the Holy Ghost. 
With all its intensely human features, the Bible may 
still be justly called the Word of God. 

It is entirely true that we may overdo our inter- 
pretation of those phrases, more or less anthropo- 
morphic, by which we have conveyed to us God's 
readiness to be our companion and to reveal himself 
to us. But we are in yet greater danger of robbing all 
these most precious and helpful truths of their mean- 
ing, and still worse of their reality. In some sense, 

[i8] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

not merely figurative, but genuinely real, we are in our 
spiritual natures, which are our true selves, of the 
same nature, of the same stuff, if you will, as God. 
The distance between us may still be great. The child 
of a profound metaphysician may hold converse with 
his father, and carry with him all the while not a few 
marks of resemblance. A single ray of light from the 
great sun has all the qualities of the splendid effulgence 
of that great orb. A single drop of ocean water has 
in it all the chemical composition of the mighty deep. 
We cannot look at man when at his best without being 
reminded of God, as he uses the tremendous forces of 
nature to his own ends, or combines them in his inven- 
tions, or subdues by his own indomitable will the wild 
beasts of the forest, or threads his way through 
labyrinth upon labyrinth of truth and brings to light 
things supposed to be utterly inscrutable. Paul him- 
self commands us to be "imitators of God, as dear 
children." 

Let us not forget at any time that this likeness of 
ourselves to God is the likeness of a child to a Father. 
It is the filial bond that is everywhere emphasized in 
the Bible. The longing of God for the sinner is the 
longing of a father for a wayward child. Rosea rep- 
resents God as crying out "O Ephraim, how can I 
give thee up," because Ephraim was his child and he 
had taught him to walk. Jesus summed up the whole 
truth in the matchless parable of the Prodigal Son. 
So also the joy of God in the righteous is the joy of 
a father in a faithful child. "And they shall be mine, 
saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up 

[19] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his 
own son that serveth him." The obligation of a man 
to God is not so much the obligation of a subject to 
a ruler as of a child to a father. Our worship, our 
communion with God, must be based upon this very 
dear relationship. In our prayers, in our adoration, 
there must be present the love, the confidence, the holy 
and reverent intimacy of children, rather than the 
dread and alarm and timidity of the subject or the 
slave. *Tor we have not received the spirit of bond- 
age again to fear; but we have received the spirit of 
adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father." 

In our worship we come to God apart from the 
world. We get away from its disturbing materials. 
God is in his world everywhere, but the very world 
keeps us from seeing him and hearing him. I once 
passed a church in a great city, while the chimes were 
playing some of the great hymns. Across the street 
two boys were quarreling and fighting. They did not 
hear the bells, and for the moment they kept me from 
hearing. We speak of the divine forces used in the 
mill, of its noises as a part of the universal music, and 
in a sense this is true. But this mill may be the scene 
of industrial strife and industrial oppression. The 
music may have discordant notes in it, may remind us. 
of ''sweet bells jangled out of tune." We may call 
our land God's country, "Land of the Pilgrims' pride." 
And yet it may be the scene of bitter party strife, the 
arena for contending ambitions, the home of radical 
and destructive economic theories, a shore to which 
races come from over the world to find that not yet 

[20] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

has this great people learned the meaning of Christian 
brotherhood. We may say that in the college and 
university we are discovering God's eternal truths, and 
with microscope and telescope beholding the invisible 
things of his kingdom. From these same halls of 
learning may go forth great floods of unbelief, and to 
the so-called masters the crucified Christ may be as 
to the Jews a stumbling-block, or as to the Greeks 
foolishness. 

Too often in that world outside we revert to the 
ways of our heathen ancestors. We find our many 
gods and are guilty of idolatry. What is idolatry? 
The worshiper makes for himself an image of the 
god to aid him in keeping before his mind the divine 
ideal which he himself or others for him have devised, 
or he may think that in this very image in some way 
dwells his d'eity. Yes, we are unconsciously guilty 
of things like this, in a more refined way, perhaps, yet 
guilty. Children or other loved ones, wealth, culture, 
noble birth, success may furnish our idols. Some- 
where in these we find our highest joy, our inspiration 
and ideals in the work of life. At the same time we 
cast our eyes toward some church, where we have 
recorded our names, and think of its altars as though 
they were erected for us at least to the Unknown God. 
Is it any wonder that John, writing to those who had 
but recently received the truth, should have said to 
them, *'My little children, keep yourselves from idols. '* 
Nor need we be surprised to find Paul writing to the 
Corinthian Church, "But if our gospel be hid, it is hid 
to them that are perishing; in whom the god of this 

[21] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

world hath Winded the hearts of them which beheve 
not, lest the light of the .gospel of the glory of Christ, 
who is the image of God, should shine unto them." 
Or perhaps we attempt as many heathen are doing 
to-day a syncretistic movement, for ourselves combin- 
ing the beliefs and worships which center in our vari- 
ous deities, including Jehovah. Jehovah's call sum- 
mons us to come out from among them and be sepa- 
rate. 

Few of us see how many times all of us, and all 
the while some of us, make our divinely religious sense 
the slave of some favorite task, instead of making this 
and every other task and energy slaves to our diviner 
self. Every power we have possesses a well-nigh 
limitless capacity. When once the soul starts on its 
journey, nothing can stay its progress. That by which 
we make our approach to God gives 'a vision of the 
Infinite, calls us to repeat the deeds of Jehovah and 
•to think his thoughts. This power must exercise 
itself. If it does not do the bidding of God, it must 
use its energies elsewhere. Why do men sin with sins 
of which the beasts are not guilty, and indeed are not 
capable? Why do men dream such dreams as the 
Greeks give us in their myth of piling Pelion on Ossa 
or the book of Genesis in the account of the tower of 
Babel? Why do we find great financiers cornering 
wheat and corn markets, while the poor go hungry? 
It finds its explanation in each case in those diviner 
capacities which should have been used in the worship 
and service of God. It all reminds us of Samson 
blinded, grinding in a prison-house. Out in the world 

[22] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

this is our constant danger, because the world is ever 
calHng for our labor. And there are things which 
must be done, and when we get at them, there is always 
the possibility we shall give ourselves too much to the 
things which soon pass away. So we do need to go 
apart. The disciples of Jesus, engaged as they were 
in sacred labor, were bidden by the Master go apart 
to a desert place and rest a while. 

The frets and worries of the world put us out of 
tune with God and God's touch. With perfect reason, 
Jesus said, *'Be not anxious for to-morrow." Read 
the things Jesus has to say about God. He is our 
Father. "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have 
need of all these things." "All these things shall be 
added unto you." "Let not your heart be troubled. 
Believe in God. Believe also in me." "Nevertheless 
not as I will, but as thou wilt." "I am not alone, for 
the Father is with me." How can we find a God like 
this, while our hearts are swept by the storms of the 
world ? Not in the fire, nor in the tempest, but in the 
still small voice did the prophet hear the divine voice. 
Some years ago with a group of ministers I was riding 
on quite a long journey through one of the beautiful 
mountain sections of our country. We were enjoying 
with rapture what was perhaps the most beautiful spot 
in all the journey, where two beautiful rivers met, 
when, looking down to the valley below, we saw a 
group of men selling lots in a newly laid-off "boom" 
town. They did not see the beauties, the wonderful 
glory about them. How could they ? Lead such men 
through music rooms where Galli Curci or Caruso 

[23] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

sings, and Mischa Elman or Kreisler plays. They 
may hear sounds ; they will hear no music. Lead them 
through art galleries where hang the world's master- 
pieces. They may see colors ; they will see no pictures. 
So are they disqualified for finding God. They may 
hear the thunder and see the glory that surrounds his 
throne. But him they do not hear; him they do not 
see. 

Pleasures dull the God-consciousness, as they do all 
the other longings of the soul. They are narcotics. 
Their effect wears off and leaves the soul more dis- 
satisfied than before. But as with other narcotics, 
though there may be disgust and loathing for them, 
there is nevertheless a determination, as if under a 
measure of compulsion, to try them again. They bring 
about an utter inability to move towards higher things. 
Before their influence art and poetry and music take 
their flight. Business too goes down before their 
destroying touch. Nothing has so baneful an influ- 
ence on the religious life as worldliness. This does not 
mean that we must give up all the pleasures of life. But 
it does mean that with regularity the spell of pleasure 
must be broken, and the deep, burning longings of the 
soul must have the opportunity to express all that they 
feel. We must be ready to say often in the words of 
the old hymn : 

"Far from my thoughts vain world be gone 
Let my religious hours alone." 

Indeed, though not in any monkish sense, if we would 
reach the heights of the knowledge and practice fully 

[24] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

the divine presence, we must get away from all the 
world even at its best, in some closet, on some moun- 
tain-top, in some desert place, or in the quiet of some 
temple in fellowship with other women and men, who, 
like ourselves, for the moment have no desire except 
to meet with God. 

There is ever the possibility that we may take the 
world with us into the sacred place, where we are ex- 
pecting to find God. We are still perplexed with our 
business problems, planning for our next round of 
pleasures, fretting over the petty annoyances which are 
ever with us outside. What a startUng vision it would 
be, if the minds of any congregation were open to our 
gaze. Let us not imagine that we shall find God, just 
because we have come to his house or have put our- 
selves in the attitude of prayer and worship in our 
closets. There is that other blessed possibility of 
withdrawing a while from the world on the crowded 
streets, and in the noise and rush of business, and there 
communing with God. In either case, "they that wait 
upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall 
mount up with wings as eagles ; they shall run and not 
be weary ; and they shall walk, and not faint." 

In our places of worship we use material things, 
means to the great ends we have before us in our wor- 
ship. There are other things which we cannot prop- 
erly call material, but which are not in themselves 
necessarily religious. All the world is sacramental. 
Each object which we see or touch, each experience 
reminds us of God or some fact in his kingdom of 
grace. How many times Jesus said, "The kingdom of 

[25] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

heaven is like" this or that. And we need not be sur- 
prised at this, for all things were made by him and in 
each thing his hand and his mind must be seen. 

"Our midnight is Thy smile withdrawn; 
Our noontide is Thy gracious dawn; 
Our rainbow arch Thy mercy's sign; 
All, save the clouds of sin, are Thine." 

We have a right then to expect to see in all creation 
the image of the invisible, spiritual things revealed to 
our hearts by God's personal revelation. And we need 
not be surprised that in skillful hands things wholly 
material may be made to give effective and eloquent ex- 
pression to the noblest dreams and inspirations. There 
can be no more forcible illustration of this than art. 
The early church fathers said that no one could look 
on the famous chryselephantine statue of Zeus, with- 
out being lifted to higher thoughts and better living. 
What a call to purity does one find in the Apollo Bel- 
vedere, and what a call to heavenly mindedness in the 
Sistine Madonna! 

In the church those things which outside are sacra- 
mental are used for sacramental purposes. Jesus per- 
formed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and then 
reminding the people that this meal might be to them 
a symbol of himself, he said, '*I am the Bread of Life." 
In the most holy of the church ordinances, he again 
used bread, but said, as he handed the broken frag- 
ments to his disciples, "Take, eat: this is my body 
which is broken for you." Pure water is used to rep- 
resent in baptism the washing of regeneration. Words, 
which may be used for many ends wholly secular, 

[261 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

become the Christian message which on human lips 
may be the fooHshness of preaching, but may in God's 
hands bring about his pleasure to save them that be- 
lieve. And we shall not overlook the prologue to the 
Gospel of John and the description there given of 
Jesus, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word 
was with God, and the Word was God." The beauty 
of the house of worship brings us "to behold the 
beauty of the Lord," as we "inquire in his temple." 
The great organ, which is in itself a great orchestra, 
and the great choir lift our thoughts to the heavenly 
multitude who rest not day nor night, as they sing 
God's praise and strike their many harps. The church 
building is a constant reminder of the sanctity and 
glory of the new Jerusalem, "Jerusalem, the golden." 
It is easy for us to be so obsessed by the means of 
grace that we shall miss the grace, to be so attracted 
by the symbol as to overlook altogether the lesson it 
teaches. We may go to church to hear the splendid 
music, or to see the beautiful windows, or to listen 
to the eloquence of the gifted preacher. Or we may 
look for magical effects in the round of ritualistic and 
sacramental performances. The place of prayer may 
become a place of entertainment and no more. The 
church may magnify unduly the materials used for 
sacramental worship. The building may be too elabo- 
rately decorated, the music may be so chosen and so 
rendered as to fix attention exclusively on the music 
and the performers, and the preacher may attract 
attention to himself rather than to the Christ whose 
messenger he is. The perfection of it all may be its 

[27] 



WHEN GOD AND IMAN MEET 

greatest imperfection. It is noteworthy how often 
ritualism grows when spirituality begins to decline, as 
in many a home the absence of love and tenderness is 
atoned for by improving the furnishings or by giving 
luxurious entertainments. 

The opposite extreme to ritualism quite often is just 
as surely an indication of a lack of spirituality. The 
man who says he cannot worship with any form, and 
must cast aside all the beautiful and rid himself of all 
symbolism, may be as far from God as the man who 
insists he must go through certain routine prayers and 
put himself in certain attitudes in order to satisfy his 
religious nature. It is as though a man should insist 
that he must leave the stately mansion which wealth 
has made it possible for him to build in the aristocratic 
section of some city for himself and his family and 
go back to the log house in the mountains, where they 
spent together their humbler days, in order to bring 
back to himself his love and devotion to his wife and 
children. There is furthermore the strong probability 
that, having conceived the idea tliat we cannot find God 
in beautiful churches and through beautiful forms, we 
shall begin to think of the beauty and harmony of the 
world as wholly sensuous or even sensual and wholly 
emptied of God. Instead of singing w^ith the Psalmist, 
"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firma- 
ment showeth his handiwork," we shall assume the 
pessimistic and Buddhistic attitude, and find at every 
turn of life no matter how great the beauty or the 
glory, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit." Jesus 
loved to go to the temple on the great days of the 

[28] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

Hebrew church year, and so truly found God there in 
the multiplied forms of worship, that he called the 
place the house of prayer. On the other hand, in the 
synagogue with its great plainness of service he read 
in the Scripture for the day the words of Isaiah, "The 
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed 
me to preach the gospel to the poor — to preach the 
acceptable year of the Lord," and when he had closed 
the book, declared, *This day is this Scripture fulfilled 
in your ears/' 

It must be admitted that different temperaments find 
different methods of approach to God, and we must 
recognize the rights of others in such sacred matters 
while we claim our own. The logician will probably 
find God through his reasoning powers. He may pre- 
fer that church where the preaching function is em- 
phasized, and where the preacher has the same type of 
mind as himself. The man of artistic and poetic taste 
will like a service where the beautiful is present in a 
larger degree and he can find God more easily there. 
The emotional man feels nearer God in a church 
where the evangelistic note and method are in all the 
preaching, singing, and prayers. To all these lives, 
God may be truly speaking, and through them as well, 
the same truth with the same voice. It is the same 
wind pumped by the bellows through the various stops 
and pipes of the organ, although the tones so largely 
vary, and the same music may be played again and 
again with varied combinations. So the Spirit of God, 
who like the wind bloweth where he listeth, may bring 
forth the same experience and the same truth through 

[29] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

lives as widely different as a James Martineau, a Phil- 
lips Brooks, a D. L. Moody, a Billy Sunday. That 
the experiences are the same is plainly indicated in the 
hymnals of the different churches. In our Methodist 
hymnal, for illustration, we have hymns by Roman 
Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Episcopalians, 
Baptists, Calvinists of every type, Quakers and Metho- 
dists. The experiences are the same, but how very 
different were the conditions and forms under which 
they had these experiences. The important thing is 
that they found God, or that God found them. And 
this is evident, that it is one and the same God. 

We must trust neither to our temperaments nor to 
the forms of the house of God. We must keep before 
ourselves why we are in that place selected by us for 
our devotions. A constant weakness of all life is the 
dissipation of our energies among non-essential things, 
at least non-essential from the point of view of the 
thing we are doing. So men fail in business, and in 
the accumulations and purposes of scholarship. So 
generals with great armies have met with ultimate 
defeat, when by every token they should have won the 
war. Nowhere else is it more needful to make the 
motto of our lives, 'This one thing I do," than here. 
We may so easily turn ourselves into psalm-singers, 
or sermon-tasters, or repeaters of creeds, and "amid 
the blaze of gospel day," find ourselves in darkness. 
There must ring in our souls the prophetic command, 
"Seek ye the Lord while he may be found. Call ye 
upon him while he is near." And no man ever sought 
in vain. 

[30] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

These means (so often material) used in our worship, 
God has used more frequently than we think to bring 
the unsaved to himself. Here are things which they 
understand and which they like, and as they draw near 
to see the sight they find God, as Moses found him in 
the bush on the desert. One day, shortly after a rather 
elaborate Easter Sunday in my church, I received a 
letter from a man telling me that on that Sunday he 
heard the chimes in the church tower, and drew near 
the church to hear them the better. He was surprised 
to find so costly a church building in that city, and 
thought he would step inside for just a moment. The 
organist, and then the choir, attracted his attention, and 
he stopped to hear them through. He then felt he 
ought not to leave. The sermon seemed as though it 
had been especially prepared for him, a man who some 
years before had lost his only son and child and given 
up all his faith. He had given his heart anew to God, 
and the next Sunday was to reunite with the church. 

Our hearts will not be satisfied unless we find God 
himself. At times we try to reason ourselves into the 
confidence that he is near. Perhaps we go over the 
old arguments called by long names, cosmological and 
the rest, until we are moved to say, "The fool hath said 
in his heart, there is no God.'* We work out very 
little more than the conviction that the universe, in- 
cluding ourselves, is inexplicable without the thought 
of his existence. This is good as far as it goes, but 
how short a distance it takes us ! It would be a com- 
fort to a child, bereft of his parents in infancy to be 
able to assure himself of his legitimate birth of noble 

[31] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

lineage, but it would never repay him for the lack of a 
mother's caress or a father's strong, yet tender, pro- 
tection. It would be sweet to him to look at the por- 
trait of his mother, but a poor substitute would this be 
for her kiss and the gaze of her eyes deep down into 
his. I would not say that philosophical arguments are 
worthless. No, they confirm our faith. They assure 
us that the fellowship in which we rejoice is a reality, 
and no fond dream. They give us ready answers to 
those who call our joy in question. At the same time 
we need far more than this. There is little to inspire 
and comfort here. In the presence of the most un- 
answerable arguments philosophy may present, \ve 
should be moved to exclaim, **My heart and my flesh 
crieth out for the living God." 

Of little more value is a theological elaboration of 
the attributes of God, based in never so orthodox a 
manner on the revelations of God in the Word of God. 
My mother one day towards the evening told me in 
most beautiful words of the beautiful traits of a 
brother whom I had lost before I was old enough to 
know him, and spoke with special tenderness of his 
great love for me. I felt the big tears roll down my 
cheeks before I knew it, and I cried, *'Oh if he had only 
lived to be my companion and my closest, dearest 
friend." Theological treatises cannot take the place 
of the Father's presence. A history of dogma is a 
most fascinating study. But it is the story of how 
other men thought of God and stood related to him. 
iHe cannot thus come to be to us our Lord, our God, 
our Father. Periods of the most loyal orthodoxy have 

[32] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

been quite often periods of coldness or even deadness 
in the church. In northern Africa, once a stronghold 
of the church, it was not so long after that remarkable 
theological literature, which still holds our attention, 
had been created, that Mohammedanism swept away 
almost the last vestige of organized Christianity, be- 
cause among other reasons, it came with some earnest 
thoughts of a personal God to a people, who, in spite 
of all their protestations of faith, were largely without 
a sense of the divine presence in their hearts. 

Nor does the reading and study of the Bible, in 
which we see the movements of God not only in Jew- 
ish but in all history, the visions and revelations 
granted by God to his saints and prophets, the com- 
munion of the heroes of the faith with God in burning 
bush, on mountain-top, and elsewhere, where Jesus 
appears, and where the story of his life is recorded, 
and the day of Pentecost brings the baptism of the 
Holy Ghost to the disciples, take the place of the per- 
sonal touch of God or his personal word to our souls. 
There are some who say there is no Holy Spirit to-day. 
We have the Bible as the substitute. Many who may 
not hold this view as a definite theological dogma, do 
hold it as a practical working theory of their religious 
life. The goal of their religious ambition is to read 
the Bible regularly and intelligently, always in the light 
of conservative views of the origin of the Scriptures, 
and to find here together with prayer at stated times 
the satisfaction of their religious desires. Whatever 
else or more the Bible may be, it is the record of a 
revelation, progressive very largely in its nature, which 

i33l 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

God has made throughout the ages past to men. It is 
for us, by help of these men of faith, to put ourselves 
in such an attitude that the God who is ever seeking may 
reveal himself to us also, and verify the word which 
other men have left on record for us as coming from 
God. It makes no very great difference whether we 
shall say the Bible is the Word of God or the Bible 
contains the Word of God. The important thing for 
us to know is that God has spoken to the fathers by 
the prophets. 

We hear much said about the influences of the Holy 
Spirit. It is a frequent and favorite topic for prayer. 
Just what is meant by it does not seem as a rule to be 
clear to the minds of those who use the phrase. It 
reminds us, however, of those tendencies, coming to 
the front in so many ways in the history of religious 
thought, to place intermediaries between men and God, 
as if there were a dread of coming too near to him or 
as if he would not permit such intimacy with himself. 
A man said to me not long ago, **My mother died 
when I was a boy. I cried myself to sleep many a 
time longing for her to come back to me, but her in- 
fluence lingered with me and lingers still." Blind 
indeed is he who cannot see the evidences of God's 
presence in the world, the influence of that presence 
on nations and individuals alike. But this is all a 
poor substitute for that face to face converse with him 
which every one may enjoy. A transformation would 
come into many lives, if, instead of being content with 
some far away indefinite influence of God upon their 
lives, they should begin like Enoch to walk with God. 

[34] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

It is the difference between John Wesley, the member 
of the Holy Club at Oxford or preaching as a mis- 
sionary of the English Church in Savannah, and John 
Wesley in the chapel in Aldersgate Street, feeling his 
heart strangely warmed, and ready now to become a 
flaming evangel to the common people of England. 

It is not easy to make real to ourselves the presence 
of God with us, and still more difficult to bring others 
to see that our claims are not mere fantasies, extreme 
mystical experiences, common more or less among the 
devotees of all religions. Men have constantly en- 
deavored to locate God in some sacred spot or in some 
idol or some temple. Here, too, the cry has gone up, 
"Let us build tabernacles." But students of the ethnic 
religions know that, in some of these, it became neces- 
sary to think and speak of repeated incarnations or 
avatars. The manifestation in the flesh of centuries 
ago will not suffice. To us to-day the historical Jesus 
is not sufficient. We, too, should Hke to behold him 
and thrust our hands into his wounds, and find that he 
is truly the Christ of whom we have read and of whom 
we have sung. This is one reason for the stress laid, 
at one time more than at another, on premillennial 
views of the return of Jesus. And these views are 
more to the fore in days of restlessness and doubt. 
Perhaps we are prepared to admit that God does 
break the awful silence which hems us in and brings 
us such oppression for a few great saints and prophets 
to-day, perhaps for ourselves at some great crisis or 
in some extraordinary need, and then we nearly always 
speak of his message as if it had come in some out- 

[35] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

ward sign or audible word, as if it were impossible 
for such a message to come to us otherwise. Do we 
not with the unbeUeving Jews demand a sign from 
heaven, or ask that the Father should be actually 
shown to us? If there is to be any real value in his 
presence with men, it must be possible for all men to 
know him, and to know him at all times and in all 
places. 

The personal relationships of life are not so depend- 
ent, as we sometimes think, on the material or physical 
processes or manifestations. It is not possible for us, it 
may be, to give an exact description of the features of a 
dear friend's face. Now and then we are surprised that 
some one has noted some peculiarity of countenance or 
movement of some loved one, altogether unnoticed by 
ourselves. The touch of the mother's hand or the sound 
of her almost noiseless footstep in the dark quiets the 
baby's cry. We often feel the approach of friends or 
dear ones, before we see them or hear their voices. 
It is astonishing how quickly we know who is at the 
other end of the telephone line in a distant city. It 
ought not to be to us a thing incredible that God, our 
Father, should be able to make us know his nearness 
without words or signs. Those inspirations which so 
often stir us when alone, those nobler dreams and 
holier ambitions, those deeds of heroism which sur- 
prise ourselves, what are they but his Word whispered 
or thundered in the ears of our souls. Interesting 
still is the oft-told story of how Helen Keller, blind 
and deaf, when led by Phillips Brooks into a knowl- 
edge of God, said, ''I knew him all the time but did not 

[36] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

Ifnow his name." And faith is rid of much of its 
difficulty when we keep before us the humanity of God 
as not only brought before us in the incarnation, but 
as eternally present in the Godhead, the Triune God, 
if you will, for we must know that, with all the mys- 
teries in the divine nature, there must be much, very 
much, in what God is forever speaking that we may 
understand if we but listen. 

"So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too — 
So, through the thunder comes a human Voice 
Saying, *0 heart I made, a heart beats here ! 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in Myself ! 
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of Mine, 
But Love I gave thee, with Myself to love. 
And thou must love Me, who have died for thee.' " 

Our inmost souls must go out after God. If in our 
hours of worship there is danger that we shall be sat- 
isfied with something less than God, nay, with a sub- 
stitute for God, it as frequently is true that we present 
to God something less or other than ourselves. On 
Sunday morning in the church we are giving what? 
A hymn well sung, an anthem, a sermon well prepared 
and well delivered, a body well clothed and clean, an 
envelope with some money in it. If we go beyond 
this, and bring to fellowship our spirits as well, it may 
be that we limit ourselves to our intellect or our emo- 
tions or our wills. Or we hold back from that hour 
the inner self which has been battling with great spirit- 
ual problems during the week, or has found some 
gratifying pleasure, some noble human loves. We 
come to God like great organs half of whose stops are 
silent or a violin all whose strings have snapped save 

[37] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

one. The best of musicians with such instruments 
are restricted in the giving of the music of their souls. 
So God needs all we are in order to speak his truth 
and pour out his music. Things in us which at other 
times do not show their faces must be present now. 
These are the things which make us what we are. 
These are the things which God most of all desires. 
While I do not much care for the term in this con- 
nection, it is in a sense the subconscious self that must 
meet God in the way and hold communion with him. 
"He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High 
shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty," God's 
Word assures us. With equal truth might that Word 
have said, **When God dwells in the secret place of 
human lives, he knows those lives and those lives know 
him." 

Here is found no place for unreality, for mere act- 
ing, for what the Gospels call hyprocrisy. There 
must be neither a claim for greatness or purity which 
we do not possess, nor the maudlin acknowledgment 
of weaknesses or crimes of which we are not guilty. 
A teacher of a class in art asked a negro woman, a 
relic of the olden days both in manner and in dress to 
pose as a model for her students. At the hour ap- 
pointed she appeared dressed in the garb of these mod- 
em days, wearing clothes she had borrowed from her 
neighbors for the occasion, and assuming the airs of 
her white sisters, and so totally unfit to fill her engage- 
ment. Just as the preacher frequently assumes an en- 
tirely different tone of voice when he stands in the 
pulpit, the worshiper will cease to be the man of the 

[38] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

streets or of the counting-house. Such a man receives 
what truth may come to him as if he were a phono- 
graph, or a sign-board on which to hang important 
announcements. No better words could have been 
given us with which to enter on our worship than 
Charlotte Elliott's much used hymn: 

"Just as I am without one plea, 
But that thy blood was shed for me, 
And that Thou bid'st me come to Thee, 
O Lamb of God, I come ! I come !" 

These are they who get the most from God, as they 
also give the most to God. 

Certainly there must be sincere confession. Such 
a confession will show that we know ourselves and 
have brought these selves to God. It will involve an 
acquaintance with the good in ourselves and a modest 
claim. The very recognition of our sins and failures 
carries with it a recognition of the fact, that these do 
not represent our true selves, and that we may do better 
than we have ever done before. But there will be a 
due appreciation of our distance from the ideal both 
human and divine, and a profound sorrow for our in- 
firmities. This vision of our imperfections will be the 
more vivid when we come into the presence of God's 
glory and love, and the higher we climb in the achieve- 
ment of character, the more will each omission pain 
our souls, even as a Paderewski will shudder at a dis- 
cordant note in his playing — to him discordant, but 
unnoticed by the hearer. While making our confes- 
sion, let us remember that experience of Ezekiel, when 
God appears to him, and he throws himself upon his 

[39] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

face, and God says to him, "Stand on thy feet and I 
will speak to thee." And did not God reprove Moses 
for belittling himself, when he was called to the great 
task of delivering the children of Israel from bond- 
age? We must present with the confession of our sins 
the confession also of our true greatness — a greatness 
against which we have sinned as truly as we have 
sinned against God. It will appear to us as a greatness 
rather in its possibilities, a greatness which awaits the 
presence of God to bring it to completeness. 

It will not be sufficient for us on the Lord's Day 
to seek to shake ourselves loose from worldly concerns, 
not even if we add the saying of our prayers at stated 
hours during the week, if at all other times our minds 
and hearts are overwhelmed with business and pleas- 
ure. If we give the best that is in us most of the time 
to that which is earthy, we shall find it well-nigh im- 
possible during the remaining moments to give that 
best to heavenly things. Do we not frequently see 
men, good men, energetic in business, enthusiastic over 
sports, devoted to the battles of politics, dull and lacka- 
daisical in the church, whether in worship or in the 
work of the kingdom ? They have used up their ener- 
gies on other things. They have but little to present 
to God. We must keep before ourselves in our busiest 
moments the conviction that this life of ours is not for 
these things. We must reserve our best for God's serv- 
ice. The business itself will then have a new meaning. 

Here is a man into whose home the first child has 
come. He is a man of large business interests. But 
now all his interests of every sort are viewed from the 

[40] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

standpoint of a six or seven-pound piece of flesh. H6 
hurries home with a' new step* He has in mind all the 
day long, crowding into his busy hours, his interviews, 
his orders to his employees, the dreams he has for the 
future of his boy. No longer do the material interests 
take the first place; a new responsibility, a new joy has 
come into his life. I have a friend, who, in the note- 
book which he keeps in his vest pocket to record his 
engagements and other matters of special interest and 
importance, records side by side, and not on separate 
pages, things demanding his attention in business, in 
social and civic affairs, in church and Sunday School. 
Such a life God can find when he has a word to say. 
Great men of wealth have a way of guarding well the 
entrance to their offices, and it is impossible to have 
conferences with them, except when they are convinced 
that you have a matter of real interest to them. Many 
a life presents a picture like this in the presence of 
God. He must await his turn — and* possibly his tiim 
will never come. 

There must be an: enthusiastic entrance of our whole 
self into this experience. None of the greater things 
can be done by those who go at them in a half-hearted 
way. Every kingdom worth possessing must be taken 
by violence if taken at all. The Bible presents us many 
illustrations. There is Jacob wrestling with the angel, 
with all his powers, until the break of day, and saying 
all the while, "I will not let thee go, unless thou bless 
me.** There is the Syro-Phenician still holding on in 
spite of the Master's refusal and saying, "Truth, Lord,- 
yet the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from the rich 

[41] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

man's table.'* And there is Paul pressing upon God 
his plea for deliverance, until the victory comes in the 
assurance of grace sufficient for all trials. Indeed in 
the whole history of the church you will find that those 
to whom God has most fully made himself known have 
gladly opened up their souls to him. You see it in 
men like Carey, and Judson, and Livingstone, in 
Augustine, and Luther, and Wesley. With abounding 
joy they search their lives for some new treasure to 
give, to God. Hear Charles Wesley sing: 

"O would He more of heaven bestow. 

And let the vessels break, 
And let our ransomed spirits go 

To grasp the God we seek; 
In rapturous awe on Him to gaze, 

Who bought the sight for me; 
And shout and wonder at His grace 

Through all eternity." 

'Only those things to which we give ourselves enthusi- 
astically get the depths of our souls. Our inmost selves 
respond to God only in so far as we love him with all 
our soul and with all Our mind and with all our 
strength. 

The largest experiences come with an entire abandon 
of ourselves, like that with which we receive our larg- 
est gifts of friendship and love, of music, art and 
nature's beauties. This does not mean that we are to 
yield blindly to anything, however high or holy, or even 
to God. But it does mean that, having found out the 
truth or beauty of those things of largest value, we are 
*no longer to waste our time in continuous reasoning 
or seeking of proof. We are to yield ourselves un- 

[42] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

hesitatingly henceforth, and thus do we discover things 
otherwise unknown. And there comes to us a grow- 
ing confidence in the reality of those things which 
by the slower processes of reasoning, we had accepted 
as true. They come to have such an intimate connec- 
tion with all that makes us men, that our very being 
afterwards depends upon them. To give them up is 
like destroying ourselves. Nor should we forget that 
God gives himself to us with the same abandon. Be- 
cause he loves, he gives out of his great heart his Son. 
In the cross he lays at our feet all the resources that 
are in him. To them that love God all things work 
together for good. In the atonement we have the 
power of God unto salvation for every one that be- 
lieves. Thus as he pours out his sunbeams without 
counting them, and scatters the wild flowers over the 
prairies, even where no eye sees them, so he pours 
forth his truth and love upon the world and gives with- 
out stint himself. 

Finding God in the church and in other hours of 
worship, we see and hear him elsewhere. We belong 
to that happy group of whom it is said : 

"Where'er they seek Thee, Thou art found, 
And every spot is holy ground." 

Men of artistic training, who have lived among the 
masterpieces of Raphael, or Angelo, or Rembrandt, 
get such a knowledge of their genius and of the char- 
acteristics of their work, that out of piles of paintings, 
the creators of which are unknown, they are able now 
to pick out those which may have been the productions 
of these distinguished men. And the same is true of 

[43] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

literature and music. The expert lapidary, constantly 
handling, cutting, and setting diamonds and other pre- 
cious stones, comes at last to see at a glance the genuine 
jewels and the imitations, and among the genuine to 
decide the relative values. When Samuel went to Eli 
to ask the bidding of the priest, thinking it was his 
voice he heard calling him, with all his failings and 
failures Eli knew whose voice Samuel had heard, and 
told him if he heard the voice again, to say, "Speak, 
Lord, for thy servant heareth." Not altogether in 
vain had he performed his daily round of duties, wait- 
ing upon the Lord and receiving the Word. When Mr. 
Fletcher had died, 'one night Mrs. Fletcher had a 
dream, a vision in which she saw the great host of the 
redeemed and heard them sing, and in the chorus she 
recognized her husband's voice, which she had heard 
through years of intimate, loving fellowship. She in- 
sists that she would have known that voice anywhere. 
There are many sounds in the world around us, but in 
the midst of them the voice of God is ever speaking, 
speaking to us. How happy is it, if we have in the 
secret place become so familiar with that voice, that we 
shall know it anywhere, and so shall never find it 
silenced by the noises that crowd us in. 

After a while the formal stated prayer is very sim- 
ple. It does not become at any time needful to ago- 
nize, as it has been expressed. Here is a great saint 
and teacher who had a favorite pupil boarding in his 
home. The young man was greatly impressed by the 
good man's purity of .life and apparent nearness to 
God. He lingered at the teacher's chamber door one 

[44] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

night, when he was about to retire, listening, if per- 
chance he might pray aloud. The pupil was almost 
startled at the simplicity of the pfayer, ''O Lord, we 
have known and understood each other for a long time. 
I thank thee for the blessings of this day, and for thy 
presence with me now. Good night." This same great 
teacher was heard one day by this same pupil, while 
making ready for his classes of the next day, to cry 
out as he meditated on the teachings of Jesus, "I have 
but one passion. It is he. It is he." Such a man 
will not seek to ascend into heaven to bring Christ 
down from above. He will not descend into the depths 
to bring Christ up from the dead. The word will 
indeed be nigh, in his mouth and in his heart. He 
enjoys what may be called the immediacy of the divine 
presence. His daily work, whether secuEar or re- 
ligious, is so performed that it partakes of the nature 
of prayer, and with each stroke the hands of God are 
by his hands, and the voice of God cheers him on. I 
heard a man say not long ago that before he had ever 
had any great sorrow, he had worked out, with the 
guidance of the Holy Spirit, the meaning of an experi- 
ence like this, and had learned to find God always near, 
and so, he said, when the sorrow did at last come, a 
great and heavy one, immediately God filled his life 
with his presence. 

Here is the best solution in a quite practical way of 
what we are pleased to call the mysterious providences 
of God. When God is ever with us, the God we learned 
to know in the moments of glad experience, we feel 
the assurance at last that he is the same yesterday and 

[45] 



WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

to-day and forever. The things we do not understand 
must be interpreted in the light of those triumphant 
moments when he is so near. It is not hard for 'us to 
say, '^Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." A 
Confederate soldier was once talking about Stonewall 
Jackson in my presence. He first at some length spoke 
of the nobility of the man, his deep piety, his faith- in 
God, his loyalty to duty no matter how hard. Then he 
began telling us how exacting he was, how hard on his 
men, how almost pitiless in hi^ requirements, when all 
at once he paused and said, "But we men adored Stone- 
wall, we were willing to attempt anything he asked." 
The world — and this includes our part of it which 
seems for a while to be in a tangle — is his world. He 
made it w^ith all its beauty and order and music. His 
Spirit, long before the order came, when there was 
naught but desolateness and emptiness "sat brooding 
over the vast abyss."* Surely now he is able to take 
care of the situation in which his creation finds itself. 
He came to us in a new creation; he so released our 
inner selves and so impressed us with a sense of our 
sonship, that our hearts cried out with fervent joy. 
We are not to be disturbed now by earthquake and 
tempest. He can take care of his new creation also. 
We have then but to hear his voice and all is well. 
As the child of a lovely Christian mother was being 
placed on the operating table, she turned and asked 
her mother, "Does this have to be done." "Yes, my 
child," she said. Then the child answered with a smile 
on her face, "It is all right." Very early do we learn 
that the fellowship with God is a fellowship of suffer- 

[46] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

ing, and we are not surprised to find it so. We need 
but to know it is his voice we hear. 

"Breathe through the heat of our desire 

Thy coolness and Thy balm; 
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire : 
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, 

O still small voice of calm!" 

We come back to our Bibles to find new meaning 
in them, and to have many of our difficulties fade 
away. We have heard his Word; we come now to 
read his Word, and it is the same Word. It is a mes- 
sage of fatherly love and solicitude, a message of warn- 
ing and of grace, a call to duty and to sacrifice. Read 
the Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles and in all alike 
we feel at home now. The God who spoke to us in 
our experiences, in the worship of the Church, in the 
closet, is the God who spoke to David, and Paul, and 
John. As we roam through these sacred pages, we 
find nothing strange. It is an old sweet truth with 
which we are perfectly familiar. The means by which 
the truth is conveyed to us have lost their importance. 
We have heard God speak to us in the elaborate ritual, 
in the humble prayer-meeting, in the camp-meeting, 
and on the corner of the street, where with a band o£ 
music the Salvation Army calls the people to hear the 
gospel preached. What we longed for and what we 
heard was the voice of God. Our Bibles give God's 
message in many ways and in many portions — through 
ancient story, burning bush, fable, history, wars, para- 
bles, miracles, until the final revelation in Jesus of 
Nazareth. We greatly blunder, when we contend fof 

[47] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

any special interpretation of these means employed, 
whether these interpretations be conservative, progres- 
sive, or radical. If, with our acquaintance with God, 
in our hours of worship we read this wonderful divine 
library, we shall hear him speaking to men in all the 
past, even as he has spoken to us, and we sliall realize 
that we are a part of that goodly company in all the 
ages to whom he has made known his saving truth. 

When we go from this intimate acquaintance with 
God out into the world, and hear the many voices cry- 
ing, "Lo ! here is God. Lo ! there is God," we are not 
deceived. The traveler who has spent much time in 
lands where the mirage is common, and who at the 
same time is familiar with the beauties of real moun- 
tains and lakes, and palaces, will not be deceived by the 
optical illusion which sometimes has lured men on to 
death. There are fanaticisms and religious hysterias 
and impossible experiences ever among us. They claim 
peculiar honor for themselves. They are found at 
times connected with beliefs both absurd and danger- 
ous. They are quite unlike those genuine raptures of 
God's true children, which he grants as foretastes of 
heaven. The protection against all false ecstasy is the 
*'unction from the Holy One," and not a rationalism 
which dries up the fountains of the soul. We must 
not, just because there are so many sects constantly 
arising which assert they have special insight into the 
truth and special fellowship with God and revelations 
from him, coupled with physical manifestations which 
have no relation to the Spirit of God, surrender those 
rich and real joys, that holiness of life, that consecra- 

[48] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

tion to the service of God and to human good, which 
are the direct result of the Hfe of God with us and in 
us. Every hypocrisy, every religious sham or travesty 
indicates that somewhere are to be found the things 
of which these are but the imitations. We must trust 
those blessed hours of worship in which we have seen 
God face to face in a sublime spiritual sense, and yet 
have lived. 

Look for a few moments at the ennobling, enlarging, 
strengthening power of worship. This we should ex- 
pect, if worship is all we claim for it. Here we come 
into contact with the God who is the source of life 
and power. We look out on the boundless expanse of 
the infinite. We are taken out of the wholly material, 
and feel the breaking of the fetters that bind us to the 
visible and temporal. We see all things that are and 
all that are yet to be, not in some fragmentary way, 
but whole, as they center themselves in God and are 
held together by his hands. We see the spiritual side 
of things, even the most sensuous, and all the material 
is only a thin veil behind which we see the face of the 
Eternal. We come into contact with men, whether 
we kneel in the public worship or in private devotions,, 
and this contact with men means now association with 
the best in them, that which makes them men, that 
which makes us of one race and all of us the children 
of God. And we are in communion with the saints 
beyond the river. In those hours, too, the richest, 
best within ourselves asserts itself, and we know our« 
selves as before we did not dream ourselves to be. Yoa 

[49] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

no doubt remember these words of Browning in his 

'Taracelsus" : 

"Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise 
From outward things, whate'er you may believe. 
There is an inmost center in us all 
Where truth abides in fulness : and around, 
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
This perfect, clear conception — which is truth, 
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh 
Binds it and makes all error: and to know 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without." 

Two things happen to our intellects. We have 
bigger minds with which to think. We are not bound 
by the rules and regulations which govern the great 
society of the intellectuals. We are not browbeaten 
and not affrighted by the'r great wisdom. We also 
dare think, as we dare leap and walk, and sing. Neither 
the theological nor the ecclesiastical inquisition can re- 
tain its hold upon our reasons nor us. *'We are mount- 
ing up with wings as eagles," now, and neither the 
snare of the fowler, nor the shot of the rifle can reach 
us. Most of us still have such poor vision, that we see 
man as trees walking — what a queer universe; it is 
largely topsy-turvy. We wait for that divine touch 
which shall give the clear insight. 

And then there is brought to us the material for our 
bigger minds, our liberated thoughts to use. We begin 
to learn that this is not a dangerous universe we live in, 
that it is neither inhabited nor owned by the devil's 
forces, that it is our Father's house of many mansions, 
that every dwelling-place, yea, every room is free from 

[50] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

terror, that the tomb itself has in it no gloom, since 
Jesus has lain there. We know now that the universe 
was made for us and we for the universe, that each in- 
terprets the other and that only as they work together 
can the glory of either be revealed. Hear the words of 
Paul, **The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in 
pain together until now. And not only so, but ourselves 
also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we 
ourselves groan within ourselves waiting for our adop- 
tion, to wit, the redemption of our body." This creation 
he has already said, ''shall know the liberty of the glory 
of the children of God." The materials of so many 
thinkers come from only a part of God's great world. 
Science deals with the material facts. History often 
limits itself to wars and diplomatic conflicts ; economics 
becomes a study without heart. 

Note the effect on our emotions and tastes. It has 
become quite common for the scholar to distrust, even 
to discredit, the emotions. They lead us astray, we 
are told, they interfere with the intellect, they make 
slaves of our volitions, they are the seat of hysteria. 
In this realm the fakir and the dervish live. In the 
progress and development of the race, the emotions 
must be throttled, for all higher purposes destroyed. 
More practical men look down with a measure of pity, 
if not of contempt, on the men who give us our music 
and art. The father of one of the world's greatest 
sculptors begged him not to be a stone-cutter, but to 
go into trade and make a fortune. A distinguished 
inventor found it hard to endure Ole Bull, when he 
played on his violin or talked about music. The trou- 

[SI] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

ble with our emotions, as we have learned in recent 
years, is that they have not had their freedom, and 
when they do break loose, they run wild. They are 
to be trusted fully as much as our intellects. The two 
must go together and neither is safe without the other. 
The emotions need the cleansing touch of worship, 
the enlargement which makes them more akin to the 
feelings, the joys and the sorrows, of the great heart 
of God, for a very large part of the anthropomor- 
phisms of the Bible are emotional and not intellectual. 
The need of art and music is a return to that former 
closer relation Vv^ith God and his kingdom. To this 
day we have no such music and art, as those which find 
their subjects and inspirations in the religion of Jesus 
Christ. It has been the testimony of not a few that, 
in the exaltation of hours of worship, they have had 
the visions which they chained to canvas, or to the harp 
and organ. 

Great characters have in worship been enriched and 
broadened. I do not forget the value of the conflicts 
and temptations of life, that we are urged to glory in 
trial, and count it all joy when subjected to them. Nor 
do I overlook the fact that, in mingling with men and 
dealing with affairs, we grow as if in a great university 
with its many chairs and laboratories. Does not wor- 
ship give us the life and power for labor and tempta- 
tion, a new strength without which we should be utterly 
defeated and ruined? Few of us would not testify, 
that, often, when the battle seemed to be against us, 
we have sought the Lord, more in communion than in 
petition, and have gone back to the struggle to win. 

[52] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

Many tell us that, accustomed as they are to worship, 
they spend most time at the altar on their busiest days, 
because on those days they need God's grace most. 
What materials we gain out of our experiences, out of 
the hard knocks received in the world, we very largely 
build into ourselves, while in quiet fellowship with 
God, and they are more carefully fit into us, much of 
that which is non-essential being rejected. At other 
times, we may be too busy to make the proper use of 
them, or they lie there in our characters unassimilated, 
like books on library shelves never read, valuable in- 
deed, if only they were read and mastered. In worship, 
God gives out of himself materials gotten nowhere 
else. "They that wait upon the Lord renew their 
strength." And there are those things within our- 
selves which God alone discovers. Nothing in the uni- 
verse is greater than man — ^but God. The soul can 
have no real master but him. His voice to our buried 
greatness is like the voice of Jesus at the tomb of 
Lazarus. 

Greater things are done and larger daring shown by 
those who have talked with God. We have but to read 
the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, the Acts of the 
Apostles and the annals of missionary endeavor to find 
innumerable illustrations — heroes of the faith, all of 
them, heroes of prayer, heroes of God. What inspir- 
ing pictures of Jesus, in every crisis of his career, going 
to the temple or the synagogue, or retiring to a moun- 
tain-top, to a desert place, or at last to the Garden of 
Gethsemane. Following all such incidents you expect 
to see some heroic deed, or to hear some wondrous 

[53] 



WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

truth. We catch a sight of the great plans of God, 
when we bow our hearts before him. We see the things 
he has done and is doing. Feehng our kinship to him 
and seeing the practicabiHty of his plans, as he works 
them out in us and in the world, we are moved to 
attempt what to men may be impossible, unless they 
keep their eyes on God. 

The body feels the thrill of communion with God. 
Moses, when he came down from the mount, wist not 
that the skin of his face shone. On the mount of trans- 
figuration the body and the clothing of Jesus were 
aglow with a heavenly light. Many times fatigued by 
the labor and cares of the day, after we had decided 
not to go to the Wednesday night prayer-meeting, we 
have been impelled by duty not to consult our feelings, 
and have found ourselves rested and refreshed in body, 
as in mind and spirit. We have made altogether too 
little of the connection between our religious life, 
especially our worship, and the health and beauty of 
the body. Far wrong are they who think they can best 
get relief from the toil of the week by lounging in 
their beds the larger part of the Sabbath. The house 
of God is the divine repair shop, and when God lays 
his restoring hand upon us, he does not overlook our 
bodies. 

When God talks with us our whole religious life is 
deepened and broadened. The Christian life is much 
more than worship. It says to us, "Whatsoever ye do 
in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.'* 
The inclination to neglect the morning, the evening sac- 
rifice quite often takes hold upon us, because we think 

[54] 



THE QUEST AND THE HOUR 

the essential thing is the godly walk and conversation. 
Sometimes we imagine we see something narrowing 
and belittling in the attendance upon the forms of wor- 
ship. Our religion is dependent for its existence on 
Grod who is its source. The more of God*s personal 
presence we enjoy, the nobler our religion will be. I 
heard some one at the telephone in my office the other 
day say, "Give me a better connection, Central.'' This 
is our need — a, better connection. 



[55] 



Lecture II 
THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 



Lecture II 

THE MUTUAL SURRENDER: GOD AND 
OURSELVES 

EVERY act of worship is more than fellowship 
between God and ourselves. It is the surrender 
of God to us: it is the surrender of ourselves to 
God. This is the normal relationship. Love, which 
is the ultimate force in the universe, binds all things 
together, unites heaven and earth and unites God 
and man. We recognize this truth, among others, 
in the Pauline idea of a universe finding its life and its 
explanation in Jesus Christ. This love has as its 
essential characteristic the giving of one's self. If 
God truly loves, he must give himself to the world. 
If men love God, they must give themselves to God. 
Here we see the real meaning of the mutual seeking. 
Man has ever been searching for God: God has ever 
been searching for man. For this reason, it is not 
always possible to distinguish between the two givings 
in the season of worship. It is like the service rendered 
each to the other in a perfect home, where each seeks 
to anticipate the other. There is no need of seeking 
to distinguish between the two, for in the ideal religious 
life the two will always, must always, be together. 
There is a joy in being possessed by God, so that we 

[59] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

become God-intoxicated men, driven out to marvelous 
deeds, filled with wondrous thoughts, seeing unutter- 
able visions. There is a joy in possessing God, so that 
we have his aid in furthering our holy ambitions and 
completing our incomplete plans. At all such times 
our ambitions, schemes, ideals are one, and in the ac- 
complishment of them there is perfect cooperation. 

We need not hesitate to say that God needs us. We 
miss much that is most beautiful in the Bible, if we 
have not learned this. The prophetic message is full 
of cries of God for his children to come back to him. 
He appears again and again as a heart-broken Father, 
who cannot be happy until his children, though never 
so wayward, come back to him, and with this the teach- 
ing of Jesus, nay, his very coming into the world, is 
in perfect accord. A child, when asked by a visitor if 
she would not go home with him to be his child, re- 
plied, "No, my mother could not do without me." This 
is the true statement of our relation to God. There 
can be no fatherhood without children, and if the chil- 
dren once in the home, go out of it, the fatherhood 
once more feels its incompleteness. A remarkable fact 
is here, in that no matter how many children there may 
be, no one can be given up. Each one seems to unfold 
and enrich the fatherhood. Each one has a special 
place in affection and thought, and each one has his 
special service in making the fatherhood more mean- 
ingful. Who can look out on the innumerable tribes 
and kindreds of the earth, without feeling God is 
nobler for having made them all, and for God's sake 
every one should be loved and cared for ? There must 

[60] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

be those on whom God, our Father, may pour out his 
higher love. Sad, but beautiful, is the picture of Jesus 
looking down on Jerusalem, the city which had so per- 
sistently rejected him, and grieving because while he so 
strongly desired to gather its people together, they had 
refused. We think of the tendrils of a clinging vine 
still holding out their tiny fingers as if to grasp, when 
the vine is trailing in the dust. And surely he needs 
us in the consummation of those plans of his which 
can find their completion only in human hands. 

It would seem needless to say that we need God. 
But here is the need in a peculiar sense — the need of a 
God who is our very own, given to us by himself. His 
heart is ours. His resources unlimited are ours, ours 
without any need of constraint or urging by us. We 
do not need to speak long or seek some special place 
or present some special sacrifice. His life is ours, as 
a mother's life belongs to her babe, and in later years 
to her grown up son, who may walk in at any hour of 
the night, and know that her gentle hand will make the 
bed for him, and brush away his cares and pains. He 
must serve us, and will serve us. He enters into our 
life according to the favorite symbol of the bread, 
which, when we feed upon it, becomes a part of our- 
selves. In us there are the two witnesses to our son- 
ship — our own spirits and the Spirit of God living 
and working together in perfect harmony. "The Spirit 
itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the 
children of God." 

In some systems of philosophy we are led to the 
study of God apart from the world and man, and of 

[6i] 



WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

man and the world apart from God. This may be 
legitimate from a merely scientific point of view, but 
even here it has led to many of our theological and 
philosophical errors — it has landed multitudes of 
thinkers in materialism or an extreme idealism, at other 
times in pantheism. No correct, no sane philosophy 
is ever reached through such a process, because God 
and the world never exist apart, and no doubt cannot 
exist apart. We are dealing here and must deal with 
facts, however difficult to explain, precious facts, and 
not with theories spun by human brains, however bril- 
liant. We meet two thoughts of God side by side, in 
combination, found together nowhere else either in re- 
ligion or in science — the immanence of God and his 
transcendence. Hinduism emphasizes the former, and 
we have all the uncleanness of an extreme pantheism. 
Mohammedanism has emphasized the second, and we 
have all the chill of an absentee landlordism on the part 
of the Creator of the universe. Philosophies have 
swung hopelessly between the two. Christianity does 
not explain the mystery, but states the blessed truths — 
God is independent of his works in the sense that he is a 
personality, but he is not far from any one of us, and 
"in him we live and move and have our being," while 
"not a sparrow falls to the ground without our 
Father." 

Our worship of God confirms us in the knowledge 
of a God and a universe which live in eternal union 
with each other. Worship gives us a better sphere, 
within which to work out a correct theology or phil- 
osophy, than a gathering of scholars met to formulate 

[62] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

a creed or confession of faith. The soul sees the facts 
and accepts them, even when it does not understand 
and cannot explain, but it knows. So here, with simple 
childlike faith, in the time of communion with God, 
we discover the interdependence of God and man, and 
have a clear knowledge, where the beclouded writers 
of innumerable abstruse volumes have stumbled them- 
selves and caused others to stumble. The theology of 
Paul was not created in the seclusion of some library 
or in the debates of some council. It was the result 
of the hours of communion with God, and he leaves 
still there the contradictions about which the church 
has wrangled ever since, because to him they were not 
contradictions. Nor are they now contradictions to 
those who find God. Note how Calvinist and Armin- 
ian, Baptist and Pedobaptist, Presbyterian and Epis- 
copalian have no difficulty in worshiping together. 
All disagreements pass. They are all one in Christ 
Jesus. The normal world, the normal church, the 
normal individual, will always be where God is, where 
God remains, where God surrenders himself to all and 
all surrender to God. 

In every sincere act of worship, God must give him- 
self to us. Unless he is there as a reaUty known by 
us, there can be no adoration of him. There may be 
some kind of adoration of some kind of an abstrac- 
tion of our own making and very much of this there is. 
Feuerbach has told us that it is man that creates God, 
and he pictures man as saying unconsciously to himself, 
''Let us make God in our own image." All this is 
painfully true of too many, because like Feuerbach they 

[63] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

have refused first of all to surrender themselves to 
God. Sacred spots grew up as the result of the uni- 
versal realization that God must be near the wor- 
shiper, or there can be no value in the worship. Hence 
men began to feel that he might be found in one place 
or another, nearly always where once before, to some 
one perhaps in the long ago, he had appeared in all 
his glory. We long once more to sing the old hymns 
in the little country church of our childhood, or to 
kneel once more and pray with our mother's hand upon 
our heads. There may be some one hymn in the sing- 
ing of which God seems to be very near, just because 
it is associated with our conversion, or some other 
momentous hour in our own experience. 

God is always near in every clime and in every place. 

"How silently, how silently, 

The wondrous gift is given! 
So God imparts to human hearts 

The blessings of His heaven. 
No ear may hear his coming, 

But in this world of sin. 
Where meek souls will receive Him still, 

The dear Christ enters in." 

He must speak, he must shine forth, he is self- 
revealed. All this is a matter of necessity for him, just 
as there can be no sun without light, no motion without 
heat, no motherhood without love. What we call 
revelation is this Word he is ever speaking because he 
cannot help himself. And this ought not to surprise 
us, or be difficult for us to believe or understand, when 
we know how true it is of ideal men in their varying 
t>T)es. Here are poets who cannot keep from pouring 

[64] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

forth their souls in verse, who do not write primarily 
for so much a line, but must give expression to that 
which they are and have seen. And here are painters 
whose colors are mixed with their heart's blood, and 
who transfer to the canvas their souls before invisible 
to the world. Here are patriots who write their names 
and liberty upon battlefields, because if their bodies 
do not die there, their souls will surely die elsewhere. 
Here is a great host of men bound together by a single 
great truth, which by trumpet and drum and cannon 
and bugle they send forth through all the world and 
down through all the ages. The apostles tell their 
enemies that, in spite of cruel threatenings, they must 
declare the truth. All this is but the result of the image 
of God in us, God whose heart and mind are open to 
the world. 

Let us not imagine that God has spoken to only a 
favored few, has given himself to only great saints and 
prophets. He does not give to certain favored men his 
secrets, as we take special friends aside to whisper in 
their ears, unheard by others, some special piece of 
information which no one else is supposed ever to hear. 
In this respect the heroes of the faith and of the truth 
like Paul, Augustine, Luther, Wesley, have had no 
advantage over the humblest African or South Sea 
Islander. The heathen religions are full of grave errors 
of every sort, and this is true of every one of them. 
But it is nevertheless true that their founders heard the 
voice of God, and their devotees hear that voice in some 
sense to-day. He speaks — it remains for men to listen 
and to hear. He shows himself — it remains for men to 

[6s] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

look and behold. Jesus chided the people of his day 
for being able to discern the face of the sk>% while at 
the same time they were blind to the signs of the times, 
and he called them hypocrites. We find illustrations 
of this great truth outside of the purely spiritual realm. 
It is said that the song of the steam coming from the 
boiling kettle led to the invention of the steam engine. 
It had been singing that same song for centuries in 
the ears of men, but its best notes had not been listened 
to. The electric power did not come into existence 
during the last century. It had stared men in the face 
from the beginning. They simply failed to see. A 
painter painted a sunset or a rose, and his canvas 
brought him a large sum of money from one who had 
as much right to that sunset or the rose as the painter. 
In an hour of great sorrow a man's face is lighted 
with glory and his heart echoes with the voice of God. 
You had the same sorrow. Did you forget that the 
same God and the same triumph might have been 
yours? You sat across the aisle from one who in the 
spirit of worship heard the angels singing, felt the 
power of God, recognized a divine message in the plain 
sermon, and went out to new victories. You had but to 
look and listen to find that God, for he was in that 
church for every one who at all desired him. 

The prophets are the interpreters of the message. 
They have a genius, God-given, let us believe, to help 
us to hear and to understand, to help us find the God 
who is ever near. They are like the interpreters of 
nature and of history. The poets help us to see the 
beauties around us; the astronomers open our eyes 

[66] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

to see the movements of the stars ; the musicians snatch 
from heaven its harmonies and cause us to hear their 
sweetness; the true historians bid us look out over 
fields of battle and halls of diplomacy and see '*one 
unceasing purpose" running through it all. Remem- 
ber, however, that if we were not all of us poets, artists, 
scientists, historians it would be wholly useless for 
these interpreters of the world to speak to us at all, 
and in the end all they do for us is to make us see and 
hear the things which they have seen and heard. What 
the great prophets and teachers do for us is what John 
did for the lookers on, as Jesus passed by, when he 
said, "Behold the Lamb of God (not Jesus of Naza- 
reth) that taketh away the sins of the world." Others 
might now look and see the Savior of the race. And 
great is the need for these prophets. Even where men 
see and hear, they seriously err. What strange beliefs 
prevail about the simplest facts of nature, prevail at 
times in scientific minds or minds that claim to be 
scientific ! What serious results have followed miscon- 
ceptions about the human body ! Heathenism has stood 
before God and has not known his fatherhood, nor 
even his personality; like Buddha, in the presence of 
the great mystery, it has refused even to think seri- 
ously about him or to long for him. We who have 
lived in Christian lands since we were born have read 
strange meanings into the Word God is ever speaking 
in our ears, and thought that voices wholly selfish, per- 
haps imaginary voices, were the voices of Jehovah. 
This makes the help of great teachers so helpful, and 
sends us to our Bibles, where we may find the infallible 

1671 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

guides, who, telling us how they found God and what 
he said, teach us to find him and to hear him. 

We mus]: not content ourselves with what the prophet 
tells us. It is his business just to place us where we can 
see, and bid us look, until the glory dawns on us. The 
chemist may tell us in the text-book just what we 
may expect, if we make certain combinations. But the 
teacher is not satisfied for us to know it as we find it in 
the book. We must go into the laboratory, and pos- 
sibly with some risk to our bodily welfare, make those 
combinations ourselves, and see with our own ey^s the 
results of which the books speak. In some observatory 
an astronomer has made some discovery, a new satellite 
of some planet, an approaching comet, some unusual 
behavior in a sun-spot. The hundreds of astronomers 
about the world read the story, but they are not satisfied 
until they have seen with their own eyes, and confirmed 
the reported discoveries. The woman of Samaria had 
learned that the Messiah had come and had reported 
the blessed truth to the men of the city, but they did 
not rest, until they had made their own investigation, 
and had verified her statements. You may read with 
deepest interest the strange account of wrestling Jacob, 
or stand in awe before Isaiah's vision in the temple, or 
come near to John on the lonely Isle of Patmos, when 
he is in the Spirit on the Lord's Day, but for you is 
every one of these experiences, and the stories mean 
very little until they are verified. 

It is not always possible for God to give himself to 
men — it is never easy. The material world cannot 
resist his entrance. It feels and shows the thrill of hiri 

[68] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

presence. All nature is in motion. All admit to-day 
at least this much, that matter is not all, and are ready 
to say with the Word of God, 'The fool hath said in 
his heart, There is no God," whatever may be the in- 
terpretation given of the meaning of "God." Our 
bodies in this regard are like the rest of matter. Not 
only are we fearfully and wonderfully made, but more 
wonderful is our continuance, the ceaseless throbbing 
of our hearts. With our souls it is quite different. 
He cannot force his way. Even if he did in any sense, 
it would be of no value. Only the things we heartily 
welcome after all get into our lives. Often have we 
known men to live in daily contact with each other, 
perhaps in the same home in the same business, without 
understanding each other. In his Julius Caesar, Shake- 
speare represents Portia, the wife of Brutus, as saying 
to him, 

"Dwell I but in the suburbs 
Of your good pleasure ? If it be no more, 
Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife." 

Bitter yet real is the cry of the soul as it is expressed 

in one of our great hymns, 

"O dark, dark, dark, I still must say 
Amid the blaze of gospel day." 

Almost under the shadow of the cross, after months 
of contact with Jesus, Philip asks, *'Show us the Father 
and it sufficeth us," and there is a tone of sadness in 
the reply of Jesus, ''Have I been so long time with 
you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?" Mul- 
titudes, who would spurn the idea that they are mate- 
rialists and atheists, are practically so in spite of what 

[69] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

perchance is their ultra-philosophic and ultra-theo- 
logical orthodoxy. Not different would be their lives^ 
if there were no God. 

Queer is that experience, by no means uncommon, 
where God has found his way into a soul to-day, but 
on the morrow gains no entrance. It is more than 
queer; it is saddening. Too frequently do we have to 

^* "What peaceful hours I once enjoyed! 
How sweet their memory still! 
But they have left an aching void 
The world can never fill." 

Ecstatic moments, in which God appears more real 
than ourselves and heaven seems at our very doors, are 
likely to be followed by moments of great depression. 
Or there may be what Phillips Brooks has called "the 
tides of the Spirit,'* an ebb and flow in which there may 
be a wide distance between the lowest ebb and the 
highest flow. Some of these experiences are perfectly 
normal, as when there are variations in the warmth and 
enthusiasm of our religious life. God may be just as 
truly present, when for the moment enthusiasm does not 
master our thought and sweep through our emotions 
and our wills, and we may know that he is present. 
But unfortunate is it that there should be any hour, 
when the God, who is ever giving himself to men, is 
barred from our hearts. There is some difficulty in 
ourselves in the way — with all our willingness and his, 
he does not enter, and we spend hours of agony in 
seeking the explanation. There is no need to seek or 
to know the reason why. The wiser course is not to 
study the symptoms, which may make one morbid, just 

[70] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

as one may become by thinking too much of bodily 
ailments, but to go on with one's religious life and 
know that God has been near all the while. 

"Speak to Him, Thou, for He hears 
And Spirit with Spirit may meet." 

The earnestness with which God seeks to give him- 
self to men is the most blessed truth found anywhere 
in the Bible. A very familiar passage in the Twenty- 
third Psalm might be well translated thus, "Only good- 
ness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life." 
This quite probably means that God in his love and 
mercy is pursuing us, is always after us, with all the 
relentlessness and determination of a detective. Were 
it not for the evidence all around us, evidence in our 
own lives, we should contend that it is incredible that 
God should have thus to be keeping always on our 
track. This will mean that all that enters into our 
lives — sunshine and flowers, storm and earthquake, 
gain and loss, success and failure — has in it the divine 
presence seeking, through these things in which 
he clothes himself to work his way into our secret 
selves. The mother of the boy so hard to wake up in 
the morning resorts to various means to arouse him. 
She calls gently, she calls loudly, she lays her hand on 
him and shakes him, she plays the victrola with the 
loud needle, she kisses him with many kisses. By some 
means she at last succeeds, but it is not easy. Here 
is a man who does not love the better music — it bores 
h?m. What shall we do with that man ? Reason with 
him ? Abuse him with harsh epithets ? Tell him of the 

[71] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

great men who have created this music? Or of the 
•great men who have found their best recreation and 
chief pleasure in music? The better way will be to 
place him if possible where the music may still pursue 
him, so that hearing it over and over again, being 
human, which means among other things being musical, 
he may make a place in his soul for these heavenly 
strains. Is not this what we do with ourselves in the 
time of worship? And we are in the presence of the 
seeking God with sympathetic, even expectant hearts. 
We too are divine and we must at last be found of God. 
And what is the worship of the sanctuary, or the 
worship of the lonely soul in some quiet place, but 
God's appointed way of placing us where he may best 
seek us, best give himself to us? All at once our eyes 
are opened and we behold him within the most sacred 
precincts of our souls. At last he has found us. He 
has brought to us his boundlessness, his greatness, 
his love. We say not with the wicked king, as he 
beholds the prophet whom he fears, *'Hast thou found 
me, O my enemy?" We cry out, *Thou hast found 
me. Thou hast laid thy hand upon me. Thou shalt 
never leave me." We make the words of Sidney 
Lanier our own : 

"As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, 
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God: 
I will fly in the greatness of God, as the marsh-hen flies 
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and 

the skies: 
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod, 
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God: 
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within 
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn." 

[72] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

If in haunts of doubtful pleasure, in the trickeries 
and short cuts of certain kinds of business, in the ways 
of the flippant unbeliever, the devil finds his victims, 
and we may think of him as turning his feet thither- 
ward when the ranks are full, we may well say that in 
the place of prayer, the worship of the church God 
seeks those to whom he will reveal himself and give 
himself. And it is assuredly true that many stay away 
from church, because they fear that God may find them, 
and they do not wish to make the surrender which 
may be required of them. Where the hungry soul 
kneels in deep longing for rest and satisfaction, he 
comes. '^Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, for they shall be filled." To such 
he gladly surrenders : to such he gives himself. 

There are times when God is very near. We err in 
the belief so often indulged in that now he is peculiarly 
gracious, now he is speaking with a peculiar eloquence 
unknown at other seasons. God's message always 
waits upon our readiness to receive it. Jesus said to the 
men who had been so near to him, had heard him speak 
and seen the miracles, "I have yet many things to say 
unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." When at 
last some great truth dawns on the world, the wonder is 
why it had not been fully seen and appreciated, for it 
is at once evident that it has been here all the while. 
It matters little how the case may be stated, whether 
it is said, God has been always speaking the same old 
truths and the people do not hear, or that he speaks his 
Word as men are prepared to receive it. The essential 
thing is that the delay is not due to God, but to us. 



WHEN GOD AND IMAN MEET 

What floods of glory, what marvels of grace, what 
untold strength, what secrets, might come to mankind 
in any age! We are not straitened in God; we are 
straitened in our own bowels. We are always charging 
up our ignorance and helplessness to God. We speak 
of his set time to favor Zion, as if he were whimsical 
about it. This attitude is to a large extent the remains 
of the old heathen conception of prayer and sacrifice, 
that the Deity must, by various means, be cajoled into 
doing favors. To this end self-torture or gifts or 
both might help. What a contrast to this is the ques- 
tion asked by the apostle, "God who spared not His 
own Son, but freely delivered him up for us all, how 
shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" 
The Christian worshiper, as he turns his face to the 
cross, must know that he is in the presence of the 
infinite mercies of God. 

We do know, however, that we are at times more 
conscious of God's presence than at others. Look at 
John Wesley, a member of the Holy Club at Oxford, 
or conducting the services of the church in Savannah, 
and John Wesley in the little chapel in London where 
he felt his heart strangely warmed. And there is 
Martin Luther climbing the Scala Sancta at Rome, 
and Martin Luther when all at once there sounds 
through his inmost soul the words on which the Refor- 
mation was built, 'The Just shall live by Faith." Here 
is Romanes, now wandering through all the paths of 
nature and coming back to tell us that nowhere has he 
discovered God, but, in later days, finding him in the 
heavens and in the earth and under the earth and even 

[74] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

in a room of suffering and approaching dissolution. 
The preacher, with his well-prepared sermon, will to-day 
be so overshadowed and inspired by the divine presence 
that his thoughts are the thoughts of God, and his 
voice is but the organ through which God gives his 
message, while his heart bounds with joy in the utter- 
ance. With the same text and the same outline before 
him, on some other occasion, this same preacher labors 
and beats the air and is overwhelmed with a sense of 
God's departure from him. God may be so near to us, 
that we may say, with James Martineau, that we are 
not so sure of our own existence as we are of God's, 
while another, under similar conditions and with the 
very same training and the same general outlook, is 
in the densest darkness without God and without hope. 
We are reminded of Tyndall's assertion that certain 
sounds easily distinguishable by some ears, are not 
heard by others, who have no trace of deafness what- 
ever. And these two contrary experiences have come 
to most of us at different seasons. Mr. Beecher tells 
us how once, at a flag unfurling at which he was to 
deliver the address, as he looked at the flag just turned 
to the breezes, he burst into tears and all the vast audi- 
ence with him, that flag which he had so viewed at 
other times, no doubt without any emotion. 

Churches sometimes have a special realization of the 
presence of God. It is as though all at once the place 
so much of the time dull and uninteresting, had become 
the Shechinah. I am not now speaking of revival sea- 
sons only, but also of red letter days of special blessing 
and special exultation, when preacher and choir and 

[75] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

congregation all know that God is in the place. Such 
incidents are as often as otherwise to human minds 
inexplicable, — only the fact is evident. For each one 
present, the preacher, the people, all fade away; only 
God is seen and felt. It is as when the setting sun, 
with indescribable beauty, lights up old barns and 
shacks and fields that have lost their fertility — the glory 
of the sun is all. 

Through the centuries, similar experiences have 
come to the universal church. In one age God is hid- 
den as in an eclipse ; in the following century new light 
breaks forth from his throne, from his face. There 
have been great seasons of revival, the days of Wesley 
and Whitefield, the days of Jonathan Edwards, of the 
McGee brothers, of Dwight L. Moody, and of Sam 
Jones. There have been days of creed and doctrine 
formulation when God was near to reveal his truth to 
men, and statements of faith came into existence of 
great value, which have been and will be more or less 
permanent. There have been periods of missionary 
endeavor and progress, such as came with Carey and 
Judson and Coke and these days of new enthusiasm for 
the world's salvation. The missionary spirit is always 
the result of a new vision of the great heart of God. 

In heathen lands also there are remarkable evidences 
of the nearness of God, not only in larger results of 
mission work, but also in the dissatisfaction with the 
old forms of religion, and in the effort to find a place 
for God and Christian teaching in the newer forms. 
They have a dim vision of the face of the universal 
Father, and need some one to interpret to them that 

[76] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

vision. Often the question forces itself upon us, Will 
not the veil which is over the face of the world soon 
fall away, that there may come the clearer vision? A 
most interesting fact is the frequent wrestling through 
many generations past with the same momentous prob- 
lems of philosophy and religion in lands widely distant 
from each other, among peoples of differing cultures 
and different religious faith. They were undoubtedly 
seeking a God whom they somehow felt to be near, and 
to them we might apply the words of Pascal, *'Thou 
wouldst not seek me, if thou hadst not known me." In 
all this we may find an application of the words of 
Paul to the Galatian churches, "In the fullness of time 
God sent forth his Son made of a woman, made under 
the law." 

These hours, when God seems so near, should be 
the subject of our earnest study and investigation, that 
we may if possible learn how to make them the rule, 
rather than the exception, in our lives. Eclipses, tran- 
sits of Venus, and other physical phenomena, are sub- 
jected to scientific scrutiny, even at the cost of money 
and long journeys. Men seize upon the fading colors 
of the sunset, that they may make them their per- 
manent possession, through paint and canvas. A few 
lines dimly inscribed on some clay tablet in the East is 
carefully deciphered. Here are things for our research 
far more important. What do we learn from such a 
study? Under what conditions or circumstances has 
God's nearness been so real? In all such instances, 
human nature has been permitted to express its deeper 
desires and needs. It has been restrained neither by 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

sedatives, nor by ridicule, nor by argument. The emo- 
tions have been considered as trustworthy as the in- 
tellect, because they are a part of our humanity, and 
have been given us by God. There has been an utter 
weariness with all human devices to bring quietness 
and peace to the soul that has by some misfortune 
missed or lost the Father. There has been no effort by 
men to commend themselves to God, on the ground of 
any goodness or any great deeds; but solely on the 
basis of the rights of children under the redemption 
of Jesus Christ, has the Father been asked to show 
his face. The things between them and God have been 
removed — and there he stood. The veil is taken away. 
*'But if our Gospel be veiled, it is veiled in them that 
are perishing: in whom the god of this world hath 
blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the 
Hght of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the 
image of God, should shine unto them." 

God is always near — and we know him to be near — 
in sincere worship. Then it is he easily enters into 
us and our affairs. We so often mingle other things 
with our worship. The services on the Lord's Day put 
worship in the secondary place. Many preachers call 
the worship the preliminaries. The laymen come in at 
any time up to the sermon, feeling that there is no 
breach of propriety, provided they are there in time 
for the announcement of the text. Few preachers 
make careful preparation for the worship, and the ser- 
mon with those who do not is not considered as a 
part of this communion with God. The reaction 
against the demand for conformity by the English 

[78] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

Church led the dissenting bodies, in their surrender 
of the English prayer-book, to the opposite extreme, 
and the Methodists have been greatly influenced by 
the spirit of dissent. Thus we have, on the one hand, 
the placing of the sermon in the position of minor im- 
portance, until in some instances it passes away en- 
tirely ; on the other hand, the sermon is everything and 
the worship is reduced to such a minimum that it had 
almost as well be omitted. Neither is scriptural. 
Neither is ideally helpful. There must be the proper 
balancing of the sermon and the worship. But in' every 
case the worship itself should be a message, and the 
sermon should be worship. In other words, the whole 
hour in God's house should be worship, and the whole 
hour should be sermon. The aim of it all is to make 
it easy for God to enter, and if he has entered, to 
enter more fully. It is interesting and instructive to 
read and to hear the incidents in the Hves of certain 
scholarly men, who have wandered in darkness, while 
they read the vast literature on the subject of theism, 
but at last have thrown themselves down on their faces 
crying, "O God, if there be a God, hear my prayer," 
and in that cry have known God to be at hand. 

When once God has entered, life is never again what 
it was before, and we can never again be content with- 
out him. We have merely human experiences resem- 
bling this. Friends, loved ones, become a part of our- 
selves, and when they leave us, we say that only half 
of us remains on this side of the river, and we have 
more to live for in the beyond. I knew a husband 
and wife who were quite worldly, and were more than 

[79] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

happy, as they themselves said, that no child had come 
into their home to interfere with their rounds of 
pleasure. But, after ten years of married life, a babe 
did come, a babe they did not anticipate with any 
delight. But after his arrival he mastered the home, 
and from his little throne he brought the worldly ways 
to a close. After a year, the Lord who had given him 
took him away. A well executed portrait of the child 
was hung on the wall. There, as at a shrine, the father 
and mother spent much of their time, and they often 
spoke of the wondrous attractiveness of heaven. 
There is no more beautifully tender scene in all the 
Bible than when Mary Magdalene, for whom Jesus had 
done so much, missing the body to which she desired 
so much to minister, said, **Sir, if thou hast borne him 
hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will 
take him away." Equally beautiful is the conversation 
of the two who met Jesus, their eyes being holden, as 
they were on the way to Emmaus, and told him the 
story of their Lord's death and how heartbroken they 
were. 

If God has ever entered our lives in truth and we 
know the joy of that wonderful experience, we shall 
wish him to stay. If we shall miss him for any reason, 
or wander from him, we shall desire to have him back 
again, and shall do anything to bring this to pass. We 
shall be disturbed as much as Mary was that day, when 
she did not find Jesus in the company with which she 
was journeying toward her home. There is just that 
much truth in the much discussed dogma, "Once in 
grace, always in grace." It is not true that men are 

[80] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

chosen for righteousness and heaven or for unright- 
eousness and hell, and must by a divine ordering, how- 
ever they may wander, drift back to their appointed 
places. But it is true, that the joy of the highest Chris- 
tian experience is likely to hold men true to God and 
to draw their erring feet back again to the Father's 
house. I call to mind a man, once eminent as a preacher 
in the Methodist Church, who went off into an immoral 
life, leaving the church as well as the ministry. In 
the midst of his wild career, he was offered a goodly 
sum to deliver a lecture against the doctrines of Chris- 
tianity after the order of Mr. IngersoU's. He refused, 
saying he knew too well the truth of the Gospel by a 
personal experience, and he meant one day to return 
to his former life, and he did. 

Great hours, great crises, come into many lives, 
when God is near in a sense well-nigh extraordinary 
or miraculous. It is indeed fortunate, if this should 
be true. We do not need to define these experiences 
by theological terms, or base on them rules which may 
be followed in order to obtain them, or to make them 
the ground for criticism of others or dictation to them. 
But here we begin to date a new era in our history, and 
we look back to find here the assurance that we may 
all the while have God with us, God with all the riches 
of his grace. And in these great days, we live more 
in a day or an hour than in a whole year. There is an 
unfolding of character beyond all former experiences. 
Truth is learned which no amount of research could 
have given, truth the value and the riches of which 
it takes us years fully to appreciate. We dare ap- 

[8i] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

preaches to God and holy, reverent intimacies with God 
we did not before dream to be possible. This is the 
explanation of the impression made on us by sermons 
we have heard and never forget. Not always were 
they so remarkable, but they were the occasion of some 
special revelation of God to us. We say, 'That was 
the greatest sermon that I ever heard." 

We should have many such exalted moments in our 
devotional life. It is our weakness that we should 
satisfy ourselves with one, and henceforth live there 
in memory at least. Not even of the mount of trans- 
figuration was it right that the disciples should say, 
"Let us make here three tabernacles." Let us consider 
the limitless possibilities of our own spiritual natures. 
It is well for us to have such a knowledge of ourselves 
in the face of Jesus Christ, that, without hesitation, we 
may adopt Paul's boast, *'I can do all things through 
Christ which strengtheneth me" or pray his prayer, "to 
know the knowledge-surpassing love of God." And 
let us also consider the infinite nature of God. What 
poor thoughts we have of God, if we come to believe 
that any saint that ever lived has sounded the depths 
of his love. The Bible is the Word of God, but of 
that inspired book Robinson, bidding the Pilgrim 
Fathers farewell, said truly, "There is new light yet 
to break forth from God's Word." Let us therefore 
ever go into the presence of God, expecting some new 

surprises. 

"Sometimes a light surprises 

The Christian while he sings; 
It is the Lord who rises 
With healing in His wings; 

[82] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

When comforts are declining, 
He grants the soul again 

A season of clear shining, 
To cheer it after rain." 



Yes, we are surprised, but not startled, not alarmed. 
Whatever comes to us from the divine presence, we feel 
perfectly at home in the possession of it. Let us be 
''willing in the day of his power'* and let us not any- 
where, least of all in ourselves, "Hmit the Holy One 
of Israel." Let us ask for God's gifts "above all we 
ask or think." 

We get God and all great things by self -surrender. 
Note the contrast between two famous New Testament 
characters. There was Judas who used Jesus for the 
accomplishment of his own ends of greed and unholy 
ambition, for position and power, and who, when he 
found the Master no longer of any further use to him, 
sold him for the price fixed by the Mosaic law for a 
common slave. The whole record shows that, in spite 
of his nearness to Jesus, being not only an apostle, but 
the treasurer of the little company, the beauty and 
sweetness of Jesus never dawned upon him nor was his 
character in the smallest degree influenced by the asso- 
ciation. Not for one moment did he own the real 
Christ. On the contrary, Paul delighted to call himself 
the slave of the Lord Jesus, and said that he bore in 
his body brands which attested the ownership. He 
did not know Christ after the flesh, but his insight into 
the character of Jesus, his conception of his person- 
ality, the enrichment and unfolding of his own mind 
and heart by the spiritual contact with his unseen 

[83] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

Lord, constitute one of the richest legacies of the 
Christian Church. He did win Christ, as he longed 
to do, but he won Christ because he had made the com- 
plete surrender. He no longer lived: Christ lived in 
him. These are striking illustrations of a great truth. 
But the history of the Church is full of records like 
these. We speak of the heroes of the faith; we might 
call them just as well the heroes of self -surrender. 
Those who have most truly owned Jesus, have given 
their lives wholly to him, have thought of no gain ex- 
cept the gain of him, men like Livingstone and Grenfell 
and Patteson, and women like Mary Read. They gave 
all to God ; they got all back and God. 

This rule does not govern in our religious life alone. 
No great thing is ever obtained except by the same 
process. Only in so far as we give ourselves up to 
music or painting or scenes in nature, do we really get 
these things. The story is told of a man who once 
entered a hall, where the great orator Prentiss was 
speaking, and took out his watch to time the speaker. 
At the close of the address he looked at his watch and 
found he had stood for two hours, with his hand in the 
same position holding the open watch. Whatever was 
worth the having in that address that man had through 
all the coming days. No artist can do his best work 
who follows his calling just for pay. He must be the 
slave of art, not of gold. A painter poor and hungry 
was offered a large sum by a patent medicine vendor 
for a beautiful rainbow scene at the close of a storm, 
with the understanding that over the painting was to 
be stamped in glaring letters the name of the medicine. 

[84] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

All night the painter considered the offer, for he needed 
money for almost everything. The coming of the 
day brought the victory. *'No," he said, ''I cannot be 
untrue to my calling. When I paint for ends like this, 
my skill will go. I shall one day have bread and meat 
enough." The cry heard so much to-day, "Art for art's 
sake," is true, if properly understood. On the lips of 
those who most commonly use it, it means "art for the 
sake of gold," or "for the sake of lust," or "for the 
sake of the ignorant, wicked crowd." One of the 
greatest hindrances to genuine scholarship is the insist- 
ence on vocational training, on the value of learning 
only in so far as it helps to make for us a livelihood. 
The true scholar has given his heart to the truth, to 
follow whithersoever it leads, through evil as well as 
good report. 

The church, religion, Jesus Christ himself are so 
generally looked upon as assets in the various busi- 
nesses of the world. A land company is selling lots in a 
"boom" town. Among the inducements offered, we 
find the statement that the leading denominations have 
lots and will begin building at once. A professional 
man moves to another city, and at once looks for the 
church of the largest wealth and the largest numbers, 
and gives himself to active service there. A great 
corporation builds a church in the midst of its em- 
ployees, because it will help to keep them satisfied, and 
because it is a good police power. A painter paints the 
face of Jesus, the scenes in his life, the cross on which 
he died, the resurrection, the Madonna and child, not 
because of any devotion to Jesus, but because there 

[8s] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN IMEET 

are no such subjects for art as these ; and Jesus is but 
little more than the model who in another section of his 
work gives him what he needs for the completion of 
his dream. Church music may be written, indeed has 
been written, by men who could not therefore call 
themselves the servants of the Lord Jesus, but who 
sought to make the Lord Jesus their servant. Many 
there are who claim to be saved according to the ortho- 
dox plan of salvation, but whose one idea of salvation 
is that they may be kept out of the pains of a medieval 
hell, and may live forever in the joys of a medieval 
heaven. They do as little for Christ as they can to 
gain this end; they give as little as they can. They 
often go as near to the brink of moral and spiritual 
ruin as they dare. Very different is the yearning of 
Paul after his brethren, *Tor I could wish that myself 
were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kins- 
men acording to the flesh." 

"Then why, O blessed Jesus Christ, 

Should I not love Thee well? 
Not for the hope of winning heaven, 

Nor for escaping hell ; 
Not with the hope of gaining aught. 

Not seeking a reward; 
But as Thyself hast loved me 

O ever-loving Lord." 

Jesus is still saying, **Go sell that thou hast. . . . 
And come follow me." 

Here is a loss which is also a gain, yes, more gain 
than loss. It is as though a man should haul a block 
of stone to a sculptor's studio. He leaves it there for a 
season. When he returns, half of it is gone. But 

[86] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

see the transformation. It is an angel now, and the 
scraps of stone and the marble dust are worthless. 
Jesus said, "There is no man that hath left house, or 
parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the 
kingdom of God's sake, who shall not receive manifold 
more in the present time, and in the world to come 
life everlasting." Such a man when he comes to the 
place of prayer, finds God with ease. He is in the 
right attitude to hear his voice, to see his glory. He 
is like the man who being always in the homiletic mood, 
the supreme ambition of his life, finds sermons and 
illustrations everywhere, or like the poet who sees 
poems hanging like fruit waiting to be plucked on every 
flower and star and sunset. At the same time he is 
moved to larger consecration, larger self -surrender. 
He sees the beauty of the Lord and tastes the sweet- 
ness of his goodness, and before such a vision splendid, 
as by an impulse, for the time almost unreasoning, he 
gives himself. And so self-surrender gives us God in 
the hour of worship, and the vision of God leads to 
self -surrender. Thus God is more and more to us, 
and we are more and more to God and to ourselves. 

Self-surrender, or the attempt at it, is of little value, 
unless we desire to be mastered by God. for those ends 
which with him are supreme. The history of the church 
is painfully instructive here. We see a long column 
of religious leaders, perfectly sincere most of them, 
who have sought to give themselves to the full control 
of the church and of Jesus Christ, carrying the cross 
before them for a multitude of purposes utterly out 
of harmony with that cross. Here are the crusaders, 

C87] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

who sought by force to take the Holy Land from the 
hands of the Turk. There stands the inquisition, set 
up for the purpose of forcing men into the kingdom 
of Jesus, for their own eternal good, by church leaders, 
who believed they had the sanction of Jesus in those 
words of the parable of the Great Supper, "Go out into 
the highways and hedges, and compel them to 'come in.'* 
The extreme mystic finds a strange, weird pleasure in 
having his identity merged in the eternal, universal 
essence, very much as the pantheistic Hindu looks, at 
the end of many rebirths, to find himself swallowed up 
by Brahma. Not a few seek for themselves greatness 
and glory of a religious or spiritual sort. Their am- 
bitions are akin to the ambitions of those seeking 
applause through the achievements of scholarship or 
political power, for greatness is usually desired in the 
field of those things in which men find their chief em- 
plo>Tnent and their more frequent associations. With 
yet others the aim is almost wholly ecclesiastical. De- 
pendent on certain very definite, quite often narrow, 
statements of dogma, they spend their days with a 
self-denial, in some respects quite commendable, in 
what they consider a defense of the faith once for all 
delivered to the saints. Within the compass of their 
own denomination, and sometimes nowhere else, they 
find all of God and all of the truth, for which they are 
willing to live and to die. 

Never yet has any man truly found God with con- 
ceptions and ambitions like these. It is saddening to 
read the biographies of men prominent in the annals 
of the church, and see how they lacked the spirit of our 

[88] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

great Teacher, and were without the presence of the 
other Paraclete. In the church in North Africa, which 
attained in the early centuries such phenomenal 
strength, and which produced such a great theological 
literature under names still famous, we miss almost 
entirely the missionary note, and are not much sur- 
prised to learn that here the Mohammedan forces 
gained one of their first great victories, practically 
destroying the church there. By methods which would 
be thought reprehensible among politicians to-day, in 
the interest of ecclesiasticism rather than of the truth, 
Cyril of Alexandria succeeded in driving Nestorius 
from the Church, while Nestorius and his followers, 
whose greatest crime was their refusal to speak of 
Mary as the Mother of God, became the great mis- 
sionary leaders in the East. The dark ages found the 
church, in its monasteries, giving up its time to fine- 
spun metaphysical distinctions, and in its worship 
indulging in methods and theories more akin to heathen 
magic than to the simple program of the New Testa- 
ment. The doctrines of transubstantiation and of 
tactual succession were held to be the doctrines of a 
standing or a falling Church. Those who still enjoyed 
communion with God, whether inside the Church or 
outside of it, were held for the most part in disrepute. 
All through the period of the Reformation we have 
numerous illustrations of the same truth. The perse- 
cutors of Luther, Zwingli and the rest thought they 
were doing God service, as they gave themselves, with 
an enthusiasm at times fanatical, to the deliverance of 
the Church from the heretics and their heresies. Many 

[89] 



WHEN GOD AND IMAN MEET 

of the opponents of the Wesleys, in days of great 
indifference to spiritual things, when the deists were 
putting Gk)d far off from the world and its affairs 
on a distant throne, imagined they were consecrating 
their lives to the highest of ideals in seeking to rid 
England of what they believed to be an unreasonable 
and unreasoning enthusiasm. Under conditions like 
these, not altogether unknown in more recent times, 
these words are quite often applicable, *The word of 
the Lord was precious in those days ; there was no open 
vision." 

We must know who this God is and what, to whom 
we make our surrender, so that we shall know for 
what we are giving ourselves away, and this we can 
know by looking into the face of Jesus Christ, and in 
no other way. He is the God of service. He lives 
not to be ministered unto but to minister. As he 
brings the sunbeams to our windows every morning, 
having neither slumbered nor slept, so he furnishes his 
back on which to pile our burdens and day by day 
supplies all our needs. He is the God of the cross, 
not of that cross as we see it in the crucifixes of the 
Church of Rome, but the cross which has long ceased 
to appear feeble and insignificant, the dwelling-place 
of a dead Christ, a regnant cross, a cross on the throne, 
the announcement of the sure triumph over all mere 
force of sacrificial love. He is the God of redemption, 
pledged to deliver the believer from the power and 
effects and penalty of sin. He is the God of fulfillment. 
This is to the front in the teaching of Jesus, "He 
came not to destroy, hot to fulfill," to fill out, to fill full, 

[90] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

the longings of human hearts expressed, so far as the 
Jews were concerned, in their law and their prophets, 
but expressed, not alone there, but in all the philoso- 
phies and religions of the world. When we come to 
worship God and therefore to surrender ourselves to 
him, we are giving ourselves to these ideals, and so 
doing we shall know his presence and feel that he is 
giving himself to us. If we are thinking of a life, 
whether his or ours, altogether selfish, if we imagine 
that there is a way to God or our own real selves, which 
has no via dolorosa, no Gethsemane, no Calvary, if 
we decide still to hold on to some of our sins and 
believe that holiness, except for a very few, is impos- 
sible, if we think of Hfe, whether in ourselves or in the 
world at large, as having reached its largest measure 
of development, we.had as well go our way until these 
questions are definitely settled, for whatever our ambi- 
tions and our thoughts otherwise may be, our ears will 
be deaf to the voice of God. But the soul which comes 
near to the God of Jesus Christ will be filled with all 
his fullness. 

The throne of grace is the place where Christian 
unity, the unity of the race, is a verity. This is per- 
haps not too wide an application to make of the stanza 
of a much used hymn, 

"There is a scene where spirits blend, 
Where friend holds fellowship with friend; 
Though sundered far, by faith they meet 
Around one common mercy seat." 

Divisive things do not divide true worshipers. It is a 
vain thing to hope for unity by way of doctrinal agree- 

[91] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

ment, uniformity in the administration of sacraments 
or other ordinances, or recognition of any church as 
having any authority above any other church. The 
very contention for unity on such a basis, however well 
meant, destroys the higher spirituality of the Church. 
Most inspiring was the sight of people of all creeds 
coming together during the war in the camps and else- 
where, especially in great emergencies to pray for 
the help of the one God and Father of us all, and to 
cooperate in some most needful service. In those 
moments God seemed very near and faith was greatly 
strengthened. Pentecostal scenes are often witnessed 
on the mission fields, in those great gatherings of the 
missionaries of all the Churches for prayer and con- 
ference, and with the desire to remove all the causes 
of friction created by minor differences. 

Of little value are the things which are not needful 
to that worship which gives us to God and God to us. 
We see how much that we have in our religious beliefs 
and customs can well be given up, and in many cases 
to the advantage of the religious life. We learn where 
the place of emphasis is, and this is a most valuable 
discovery. Here too we are to "seek first the king- 
dom of Gk)d and his righteousness." Everywhere, but 
most of all in religion, is it important to put first things 
first. Here numbers meet with success and numbers 
fail. These essentials bind all Christian hearts together ; 
it is the non-essentials that divide. We may well dream 
of the day, when the disciples of Jesus going forth 
from the altars where they have been engaged in wor- 
ship and communion with God, will say, "After all 

[92] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

we are one and did not know it. We are all one in 
Christ Jesus." 

These are the ecstatic hours. We are prone to decry 
ecstasy, especially in religion. There is an ecstasy 
worthless and even dangerous. It resembles the ex- 
periences of extreme oriental mystics. Emotional 
excitability may have no relation to any divine revela- 
tion or influence. It may be the result of influences 
largely, if not wholly physical, and may come out of 
an unbalanced neurotic temperament. The literature 
of the East abounds in rules for producing such states, 
rules which are in no sense religious. Among certain 
Christian sects, and with a few others in every branch 
of the Christian Church, the same states are created 
by rules unconsciously followed, but based upon ex- 
actly the same psychological principles used by the 
heathen mystics. In such cases reason is laid aside, 
not only as needless, but also as unworthy of use in 
such a sublime hour, and is in the way of the achieve- 
ment of the most complete union with God. God is 
thought of as revealing himself in words almost 
audible, making known his will as to specific lines of 
conduct, often in contravention of all the plans agreed 
upon by his people in the carrying forward of the 
work of his kingdom. Sad to say too often the mes- 
sage supposed to be received from out of the skies 
would lay aside the most fundamental requirements of 
the moral law, and for this reason, as well as because 
of temperamental peculiarities, the ecstatic is guilty of 
acts most unclean, for which he may find it easy to 
excuse himself. Where the life is essentially moral 

[93] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

and clean, the ecstasy may have no vital connection with 
the best of the life, and it may therefore neither con- 
tribute any of its own force, if indeed it has any, nor 
does it receive into itself the energy of the rest of the 
soul. 

We know, however, that the greatest deeds of men 
do not come from cold calculation but by absolute 
abandonment to great ideals, to great demands. Here 
is Jonathan, contrary to orders and in the face of 
what would appear ordinary common sense, and cer- 
tainly military sense, going up with his armor-bearer 
against the enemy and winning the victory which no 
one could have foreseen. Here is Elijah with his most 
extraordinary and daring test on Mt. Carmel. Luther 
goes to Worms as if into the jaws of death, not fear- 
ing though there should be as many devils there 
as tiles on the roofs of the houses. John G. Paton 
faces danger the most terrible and the most evident, 
with a fearlessness which at times seems almost fa- 
natical, and escapes. Livingstone goes through Africa 
to the very last with a sublime recklessness as far as 
his own safety and comfort are concerned, and accom- 
plishes for Africa what no other methods, however 
wisely planned, could have brought to pass. The maps 
of Africa everywhere have marked upon them the 
place where he died, while upon his knees, holding out 
his hands to God in prayer and to the Christian world, 
nay to the whole world, in pleading for aid for the 
people whom he so much loved. In this spirit the really 
heroic things are done on battlefields to-day, firemen 
rescue women and children from burning buildings; 

[94] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

and boys their drowning companions in the surf. Then 
it is the very best in us comes forth, the hidden treasure 
of the soul. Energies we did not know we possessed, 
knowledge which we thought had for us long ago 
passed into oblivion, insight which appears to be a 
momentary gift from some supernatural source. 

God's hands on our souls bring out the best. In no 
other way is it done. There must at last come to us 
a supernatural power. It is one of our great misfor- 
tunes that for the most part those things, those indi- 
viduals which enter into our fellowship either strike 
discordant notes or hush the very music of our souls. 
Neither do we nor our friends ever hear what we are 
capable of. Some years ago there moved next to us 
a couple possessing large wealth made rapidly and by 
questionable methods. The new, young wife, who 
had been a cigarette girl, had bought a new piano, the 
chief value of which to her was that it had cost a very 
large sum of money, that it was the most costly piano 
in town. She employed a music teacher and began to 
torture her neighbors day after day with her practicing. 
But one day new sounds came out of that home. 
What had happened to that piano ? Had the girl been 
transformed? No, a visitor had dropped in from 
somewhere, a master in music, and at last the piano 
had a chance to show that it was more than a rosewood 
case, more than the investment of a large sum of 
money. So it is a new life when God takes us in hand. 
At times we blunder, but we ultimately reach the truth, 
and our blundering has on it the stamp of our great- 
ness. How startled we are when a group of fishermen 

[95] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

begin to talk with Jesus about dominions and powers. 
Ecstatic experiences are not necessarily untrust- 
worthy. When the whole soul enters into the worship, 
the experiences are the most reliable we have. We 
have a right to believe that our dreams will come true, 
that there is a reality back of our visions. Indeed here 
is the best kind of certainty — the certainty within — 
"Christ in you the hope of glory." It is only that which 
enters into us, becomes a part of ourselves, we feel to 
be true.- This is the kind of certainty which moves 
us to action, and gives us joy and peace. We are not 
trusting to experiences which other men have had, not 
even those recorded in the Bible. 

"What we have felt and seen 
With confidence we tell ; 
And publish to the sons of men 
The signs infallible." 

The power which is to move the world, which is to 
correct the evils of the day, and bring in the kingdom 
of Jesus Christ is to come from the midst of a united 
Church, united in spirit and in all the essential things 
of the faith, on its knees in prayer. The same ecstatics 
will conquer the world for our Redeemer, and the 
Gospel is to be made known to the world not so much 
by lives of Christ, and doctrinal statements, as by the 
revelations made by those who have been with Jesus 
and learned of him. 

We may imagine we have made the surrender to 
God, just because he is constantly so near, so con- 
stantly, out of the necessities of his nature, is giving 
himself, almost forcing himself, upon us, is speaking 

[96] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

to us in words we cannot help hearing. We may be 
greatly stirred by these experiences, when as yet God 
has no real, certainly no permanent hold upon us. King 
Saul, with a keart not yet freed, indeed never to be 
freed, from its grossly evil tendencies, is so over- 
whelmed by the sense of God's presence with the sons 
of the prophet that he is seized as by a rhapsody until 
the people ask, "Is Saul also among the prophets?" 
Most of us have been deeply stirred by some warm 
reHgious service only to find ourselves on the morrow 
in the vale without any sense of God's presence. Evi- 
dently we did not after all give ourselves to him. Many 
things thus enter partially or for a season into our 
path which have no great control over us. You view 
from the rear of an observation car the hills and rivers 
and gigantic trees and other wondrous beauties, all fit 
for an artist's brush. You are entertained, refreshed, 
uplifted, but you are not an artist, you do not hang 
the pictures on which you have gazed in the gallery 
of your soul. You visit some manufacturing plant, 
and are deeply interested, even to the point of wonder- 
ment, in the machinery, the exhibition of power and 
skill, the goods which are produced. But you have no 
capital invested in the concern, you are not a purchaser 
of such goods as you see, and you are not long in 
losing your interest even to the forget fulness of all 
that once surprised you. You hear at a concert, which 
cost you a small sum of money, a program of truly 
great music. Some of it you greatly appreciate, and 
it brings real sweetness into the routine of life for a 
few days. Some of it you know is the very best 

[97] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

because experts tell you and because it was written by- 
Mozart, Beethoven, Gounod, and others like them. 
But you are not made a musician and in time these har- 
monies seem to die away in the distance. 

We need to make the surrender to God again and 
again, until it is a habit, an overmastering habit, if 
we would find God in the largest sense and liave his 
perpetual leadership. 

"High heaven, that heard the solemn vow, 

That vow renewed shall daily hear, 
Till in life's latest hour I bow, 

And bless in death a bond so dear." 

Paderewski tells how when he was in a small Ger- 
man city some years ago, he passed a house on which 
was a sign, ''Lessons on the piano by Miss Marie 
Brown." Miss Brown was at that time giving a 
lesson and giving it incorrectly. Paderewski was 
moved to walk into her studio, told her wherein she 
was blundering, and showed how it ought to be done. 
Some few years afterwards, he was in the same city 
and, walking down the same street, saw the same sign, 
which now read, "Lessons on the piano given by Miss 
Marie Brown, a pupil of Paderewski." Do we not 
come to God to find him once in some great experi- 
ence, or perhaps a few times, and think we have gained 
his great, loving self? We refer to the days gone by, 
when we did have some revelation of him, some sense 
of his saving power, and we act and speak as though 
this were enough. The soul is so used to contact with 
the material and the transient, that it is needful if it 
would get any great advantage out of fellowship with 

[98] 



THE MUTUAL SURRENDER 

God, that it should grow accustomed to the divine 
presence and to the divine voice, and so recognize God 
when he is peculiarly near, and be able to endure his 
glory. This is what is meant by the oft-used phrase 
once the title of a book, Practicing the Presence of 
God. 

There are not a few ways in which we may test the 
genuineness of our surrender to God. Partly may the 
test be made in the world in connection with the hold 
the earthly things have upon us. Do they consume our 
time, our interest? Can we find our rest here? Do 
we prefer the house of God to all other places just 
because it is the Father's House? When in the place 
of worship, what engages our attention? The musical 
performance and the eloquence of the sermon, or the 
vision of the shechinah glory? What voices silence all 
the rest ? Is this our prayer ? 

"Descend, celestial Dove, 

With all Thy quickening powers; 
Disclose a Savior's love, 

And bless the sacred hours; 
Then shall my soul new life obtain 
Nor Sabbaths be enjoyed in vain." 

But let no one be discouraged if at first God seems at 
times far away, and if there should come over him the 
conviction that he may not have made the surrender to 
God. We have but to give ourselves a chance at God, 
and God a chance at us, because we are so akin, to 
bring at last a permanent fellowship. 

Here, then, is the ultimate content of the religious 
life — ^to belong to God and thereby to own God. There 

[99] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

are many fruits of this blessed union ; but these come 
as a matter of course, and they take care of themselves. 
We do not need to worry about them. How beauti- 
fully Jesus presented this truth in his great message, 
'*! am the vine; ye are the branches." "Apart from 
me, ye can do nothing." This union is consummated 
not by personal effort, not by reasoning, not by the 
magical effect of a sacrament, not by some good deed, 
however worthy. It is consummated in the hour when 
the soul comes into personal fellowship with God in 
perfect abandon, the hour of worship. For God has 
already given himself with this great abandon. In the 
third chapter of John's Gospel we have two remark- 
able statements. In the sixteenth verse we read, "God 
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but 
have everlasting life." In the thirty-fourth verse we 
are told, omitting the words supplied by the translators, 
"For God giveth not the Spirit by measure." So here 
is the perpetual outpouring of the whole Trinity upon 
mankind. It is the gift of infinite love to the children, 
a gift in which each one stands before God as if he 
were an only child. Each time we worship we are 
coming back, but not as prodigals, to the Father's house 
— and all he has is ours. 



[lOO] 



Lecture III 
THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 



Lecture III 
THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

PERHAPS we can find no better statement of these 
hindrances to religion and especially to sincere 
worship than the words of John in his first epistle 
(2 : 15-17) 'Tove not the world, neither the things that 
are in the world. If any man love the world, the love 
of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the 
world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, 
and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the 
world. And the world passeth away, and the lust 
thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth 
forever.'* It is the world on its transient side, espe- 
cially as it is made the center of thought and affection, 
of which John speaks. Augustine says, "Let the Spirit 
of God be in thee that thou mayest see that all these 
things are good; but woe to thee if thou love created 
things and forsake the Creator. ... If a bridegroom 
made a ring for the bride, and when she got it, she 
were fonder of the ring than of the bridegroom who 
made the ring for her, would not an adulterous spirit 
be detected in the very gift of the bridegroom, however 
she might love what the bridegroom gave? . . . God 
gave thee all those things : love him who made them." 
(Quoted in Expositor's Greek Testament.) Worldli- 
ness is the one great hindrance to the religious living 

[103] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

of professing Christians, and it is not easy to define. 
Have we not here the best possible description of it? 

First, it is the lust of the flesh. This is a subjective 
genitive. The lust of the flesh is the flesh lusting, the 
carnal nature with its carnal desires. It has been fre- 
quently noted that this corresponds to the first tempta- 
tion of Jesus, "Command that these stones be made 
bread." To make bread was not wrong. He after- 
wards multiplied loaves and fishes and turned water 
into wine. To eat bread when hungry was not wrong. 
He went to many a feast both with Pharisees and pub- 
licans. It was a question of the place of bread and the 
making of it in his life. Hence Jesus immediately 
replied, **Man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." 
In another place, he had said to the people, **Labor not 
for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which 
endureth unto life eternal." Of course, they were to 
provide meat for themselves, but the stress was not to 
be there. All fleshly things were to be in subjection 
to the spiritual, which was to be supreme. 

Not without reason do the physical and material 
figure so extensively in all religions. Indeed this is a 
most interesting study. Sometimes we are told that 
all material things, including our bodies, are mere 
phantasms. This view must indicate a contempt for 
all such appearances, a confidence that they have no 
value, that they are hindrances and not helps. We 
have a modern sect which in its desire to magnify the 
spiritual has taken the same extreme position. In 
order that the material things shall not interfere, we 

[104] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

must imagine them out of existence. Again we are 
told that there can be no doubt of the existence of the 
material world. Indeed its existence is terribly real, 
for it is the seat of all sin and misery, and this is par- 
ticularly true of our bodies. It becomes necessary to 
punish our bodies and to deny ourselves all earthly joy 
in order to find God. This, too, has stolen into cer- 
tain forms of Christianity. To what agonies of every 
sort have men subjected their bodies in order to be 
saved ! There must be utter detachment from the body 
and this material world. In one of the greatest of the 
non-Christian religions, the most prominent teaching 
is that all evil came into the world through the ma- 
terial side, and that a warfare thus begun continues, 
and must continue, until the consummation of all things 
through a process largely miraculous. Scarcely a new 
movement has come into the church without some con- 
nection with the material side of things, indicating an 
appreciation of some real difficulty. We have had 
socialistic or communistic movements seeking to pre- 
vent either poverty or riches, the wearing of some plain 
garb or some similar dress of a peculiar sort, the giving 
up of every form of amusement, the practice of celibacy 
by all who would lead the higher forms of Christian 
life. 

All the way through this history we must be im- 
pressed both with the folly of the things attempted 
and with the results that have been achieved, but we 
must be convinced that in every case there has been 
the sense of a grave problem. For some reason it is 
true that our religious life must early solve the prob- 

[105] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

lem, and put in its proper place the flesh with all the 
accompaniments of the fleshy life. It is certainly a 
great error to say the flesh itself is evil. Do we not 
know the flesh was made by God? Who can study his 
body with all its possibilities, yes, even with its passions 
and appetites in their proper place, without feeling 
he is in the very presence of God? John does 
not say the flesh, but the lust of the flesh, the flesh lust- 
ing, seeking an improper place in the life. The flesh 
decides all the movements of life, and life in its higher 
aspects must bow to its bidding and enlarge the scope 
of its pleasure and control. A weird short story of a 
great American writer represents the inmates of an 
insane asylum shutting the keeper into a cell, refusing 
all his pleas for release, and taking control of all the 
affairs of the institution. This is a picture of what 
may happen to our spirits in the grip of the flesh. 

It is no simple thing to locate properly the things of 
the flesh, to put them in their proper place in our lives. 
There are two easy roads to the solution, to insist that 
everything, every creature of God, is good and go 
ahead and enjoy it, or to give it all up and be of the 
number of those who abide in the temple with no 
thought except of things religious. And these two 
schemes have been adopted quite frequently, just be- 
cause they are simple and more or less easily applied. 
There is but one answer to every question here. The 
spiritual, heavenly, diviner life must be made supreme, 
and all material things must be no more than the body 
for such a soul, and no definite rules like old-time cases 
of conscience or specific ecclesiastical regulations may 

[io6] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

well be laid down. Some material expression there 
must be. We are reminded of that much quoted pas- 
sage in A Midsummer-Nigh fs Dream. 

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven: 
And as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name." 

The poet^s dream needs words well-chosen to give to it 
an outward form and reality ; the poet may be a wizard 
with words present by thousands in the lexicon before 
him, but he uses comparatively few and escapes the 
danger of having his dream destroyed by too many of 
them. What he leaves out is as important as what he 
chooses for his use. The high ideals are often ruined 
by an excess of material things, but how could these 
ideals express themselves to others except by material 
things? Possibly Jesus never uttered a more mean- 
ingful thing than when, after warning against anxiety 
about food and raiment, he added, "But seek first the 
kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these 
things shall be added unto you." It would seem that 
he must mean that all that may be necessary in order 
to the expression of that kingdom in our lives would 
be given, the kingdom being the essential thing. What- 
ever, then, does not fit into this great structure or plan 
is useless, and may be injurious. 

It may be that a gratification of some desire, per- 
fectly harmless in one, would greatly injure another, 
and that things hurtful at one time would prove inno- 
cent at another. We all marvel at the ceaseless labors 

[107] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

of Livingstone, who tells us English drawing-rooms 
were more wearisome than tramps through African 
jungles, and stand with shoes off before the tent at 
Chitambo's village, when we find him dead on his 
knees, closing his life, still praying and longing for 
the welfare of the people he loved so well. Such 
self-denial and toil were essential to the task God had 
assigned him. But our place in his kingdom does not 
put on us such requirements. Indeed this place may 
best be filled by some of us, if we shall eat with publi- 
cans and sinners, like our Master, provided the feasting 
be done for the same purpose as filled his great heart. 
During the world war we denied ourselves food we may 
well enjoy now, although it ought to be evident to us 
all that the needs of God's kingdom in these days of 
great responsibility and great opportunity, make luxury 
in any form more than criminal. 

Our bodies, essential as they are, are often in our 
way. Nothing could be more important than to master 
them, bring them under very early in life and keep 
them there. What splendid servants they may be is 
seen in the skill of the surgeon's hands, the fingers of 
the pianist, the voice of the singer. In such cases we 
almost forget that the body is acting at all. It may be 
used as an expression of the incarnation of God in us, 
as yet more fully was true of the body of Jesus Christ. 
Think of his touch, his voice. But just as often do we 
feel the inability of the body, even at its best, to say 
what we would say or do what we would do. And if 
it is out of order, how utterly helpless and hopeless we 
are. There are diseases which seriously interfere with 

[io8] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

our religious life, diseases which tend to make us mor- 
bid and even pessimistic, diseases which produce ab- 
normal religious conditions, which demand the atten- 
tion of the neuro-psychiatrist, and whose symptoms 
have misled the student of religious phenomena. Un- 
doubtedly we may at times need a skilled physician, 
when we think we need a spiritual adviser. For every 
reason we should take every care of our bodies, just as 
:we do of our minds, but especially for religious ends, 
not forgetting that they are wondrous works of the 
great artist, God. We are being told that it is well- 
nigh a sin to have certain diseases once considered 
mere misfortunes, and surely from this higher point 
of view the sin is more apparent. When Elijah be- 
came thoroughly despondent in regard to his own 
future and the future of the people among whom he 
labored, and saw no reason why his life should be 
prolonged, God first made him eat and take a rest, 
because he had been without food and had been under 
a terrific nervous strain. 

It is scarcely needful to call attention to the inter- 
ference of bodily appetites and passions with religion 
and worship, sometimes the result of our own sinful- 
ness, sometimes in large part an inheritance from the 
past. Horrible indeed are the accounts given us by 
some of the ancient monks of the wicked dreams which 
came into their souls, at the very moment they were 
expecting to be in rapt fellowship with God. We do 
not have to be vicious to find such interruptions to our 
religious life. Often, without any full consciousness 
of the causes which disturb us, these disturbances are 

[109] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

there. *The sound mind in the sound body," is an old 
legend; with equal truth we might speak of the holy 
soul in the holy body. Wt must heed the injunction 
of the apostle to present our bodies a living sacrifice, 
holy, acceptable to God, and it is most blessed to know 
that the cleansing of Christ's blood extends to the body 
as well as to the soul. Let us call to mind how the 
psalmist says, "My flesh," yes, my flesh, "crieth out 
to the living God." There are holy faces as well as 
holy lives. The aurora about their brows is not thrown 
upon them from without; it comes from within both 
the soul and the body. 

There are interferences of a very different kind. 
Many devout souls cannot sing. What a loss this is! 
A distinguished bishop afflicted in this way often said 
that his happiest anticipation of heaven was in the 
confidence that there he would be able to join in the 
great chorus. Many do not know one note from an- 
other. Perhaps in such cases, just as deaf persons 
have quick vision and blind people have quick hearing 
and delicate touch, there are large compensations in 
the development of the inner spiritual life, and in less 
dependence on the body. It would seem, however, 
almost an obligation to train one's ears and voice to 
hear with gladness and to sing with spirit the songs 
of Zion. 

The place given to gold in the world, and to some 
extent in the life of the church stands in the way of 
the religious life. The temptation which attends the 
lure of money is not confined to the rich. Indeed quite 
often the man who has had wealth all his days is less 

[no] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

subject to the baneful influence of money than the poor 
man. He has gotten used to it. He has enough of it 
to make it needless for him to try to get more. Among 
this dass of people we frequently discover some of the 
choicest souls. The lust of the flesh, as it shows itself 
in longing or seeking for money, is not there. But 
the poorer man, who sees what money can do, who has 
come into some close connection with the glory and 
helpfulness of it, but who may see no chance for him 
to be rich, may have a desire for it that may blind him 
to the spiritual possessions. Where no longing for it 
exists, money may rob the poor man as it robs the rich 
by the place he gives it. Things may be worth while, 
churches may be great, ministers may be distinguished, 
men may be attractive, as they stand the money test. 
In such companionship, we may have our largest com- 
fort and happiness. Multitudes of sins are covered 
up from our gaze by gilded coverings. Wealth has 
rights, just because it is wealth, and in the dispute be- 
tween the rich and the poor, we are prone to take the 
side of wealth without consideration of the real facts 
in the case. Every one who has stood at the grave 
of Burns at Dumfries, has been moved by the simple 
monument, which represents the poet standing at the 
plow with a patch on his knee, a daisy at his feet which 
the plowshare has just turned up. He thinks at once 
of how Burns sang 

"We dare to be poor for a' that,'* 

but immediately how in the town near by and in Ayr, 
if he would see the haunts of the distinguished Scotch- 

[III] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

man, he must visit the public houses or saloons where 
he so often drank himself to drunkenness. The beauty 
of his poverty is spoiled. Why do we not always see 
that wealth is so often stained? Yes, it is manhood, 
Christlikeness, which counts, and for this we must 
long. 

Paul found it wise to write to Timothy, "The love 
of money is a root of all kinds of evil." The love may 
take possession of the Christian worker, when he has 
no prospect whatever of getting more than enough to 
keep the wolf from the door. In many quarters, the 
church has adjusted its whole existence to the demands 
of wealth, until the workingmen with some degree of 
justice have accused the church of being a rich man's 
organization, and have refused to have anything to 
do with it, just because they did not feel at home in 
a church so dominated. They are at home only where 
the adjustment is to the poor man's life and problems. 
The teachings of Jesus concerning wealth occupying 
as they do so large a part of the gospel message, espe- 
cially as recorded by Luke, are not to the front where he 
placed them, and are interpreted in such manner that 
their evident severity is softened down, so that they 
may be listened to by the guilty ones without any pangs 
of conscience or determination to mend their ways. 

The religious man may, with a certain type of piety, 
have loose ideas of monetary obligations. Woefully 
common is this with ministers and religious workers 
of all sorts. They may pay their bills, but with no 
proper degree of promptness. They may fail to pay 
their bills at all. The obligations of the church itself 

[112] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

in monetary matters are frequently not thought of as 
being like those of the merchant or banker. These 
are but phases of the devotion to money, the worship 
of the golden calf. There can be no abiding spirit- 
uality, no continued communion with God, no truly up- 
lifting and strengthening worship, except as we build 
upon the eternal laws of righteousness and honesty. 
Lust has assumed its worst form, when its desires seek 
their satisfaction by the violation of the moral law 
in any respect. 

The lust for gold is nearly always a lust of the flesh. 
The inordinate desire for it is a desire for what it can 
do for the outward man. It is possible, in the righteous 
making of it and the righteous using of it, to be mak- 
ing character. But when the mere glitter attracts, we 
may not care what else there may be of evil or good : 
if only the evil is not too evident or too bad, we may 
not care whether there may be anything else there at 
all. It is the gold that counts, and Jehovah cannot 
be where the golden calf, even if not worshiped, is. 

We live in an atmosphere surcharged with an am- 
bition for political power as over against the pursuit of 
lofty idealism. Ever since the days of Jesus and be- 
fore, the prophets have been called upon to build the 
kingdom of God in the midst of a people with wholly 
materialistic conceptions of kingdoms. The church 
has suffered in its own moral standards, and the mem- 
bers of the church have suffered each as well. Hov 
saddening are the words of Jesus, words we might well 
think of him as saying to-day, *'I have yet many things 
to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." We 

[113] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

must needs keep in mind that the church and the world 
cannot be kept absolutely apart, so far as they both 
enter into our lives. The citizen of the state is a mem- 
ber of the church, and if he is controlled by wrong 
motives as a citizen, he cannot have the highest type of 
religious life and experience. All the low standards 
that have prevailed in any national life have reacted 
on the church. No more striking illustration can be 
found than that furnished by the German church, and 
especially its pulpit, during the great war, when hate 
and cruelty and barbarities were defended with all the 
earnestness and eloquence which belong to the defense 
of the cross and the condemnation of sin. 

We do not need to go as far as Germany. We have 
illustrations enough in our own land. We had for a 
while very holy dreams, ideals such as no people ever 
had before. We thought of ourselves as the world's 
servant for Jesus' sake. But the things more prac- 
tical came into sight; we saw an opportunity, as we 
supposed, to regain our comfort and yet more, and then 
we crucified the idealism and the great man who at 
one time was recognized as our leader in making it 
victorious. Under the inspiration of the same holy 
impulses, our people decided definitely upon the destruc- 
tion of the liquor traffic, and now that it is all over, 
the people begin to ask whether after all it may not 
have been done too hastily, and if it may not be best 
to be very lenient towards the violations of the laws 
enforcing the constitutional amendment. The lust of 
the flesh has come back and has taken its place of promi- 
nence. Meanwhile hosts of Christian people have 

[114] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

agreed with the new position, and have joined in the 
cry of the multitude before every one of the new na- 
tional ideals, "Away with it ! Crucify it ! Crucify it !" 

No one can be an idealist in the church or in the 
religious life who is not an idealist in business, politics, 
or anything else. If the lust of the flesh is followed 
anywhere, it is followed everywhere. There is not 
much use to dream great dreams on the Sabbath, if on 
the morrow we are to ridicule them as impossible of 
fulfillment, as indeed in every way undesirable. For 
that matter we shall stop our dreaming after a while, 
because we shall lose the power of doing so. One rea- 
son our missionary appeal during our Centenary was 
so effective was the similar ideal still prevailing in the 
nation. The waning of this national idealism is hav- 
ing its ill effect on more recent plans. We must come 
to God, so far as we are concerned, with no such 
ignominious surrender of principles which lie at the 
foundation of the kingdom of God. 

Akin to this and of like influence on our religious 
life is the national trust in material greatness. We 
make much of navies and armies, and yet more of the 
great industries and vast storehouses of wealth, and 
the church is expected to join in the wild huzzas which 
accompany each new achievement. But we may well 
sing with Kipling, 

"The tumult and the shouting dies; 
The captains and the kings depart; 
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, 

A humble and a contrite heart: 
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget, lest we forget!" 

[115] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

Our leading citizens are our millionaires, our best 
people are those in very comfortable financial condi- 
tions. When we were not nearly so well off as now, 
Matthew Arnold said of us, during a visit to America, 
"Your people are too beastly prosperous." Most 
Americans are not disturbed at the word "beastly," 
provided only there be large truth in the word "pros- 
perous." The whining to-day over the financial situa- 
tion is largely the result of the inability to gather in 
the money quite so rapidly now as a few months ago. 

We are not to forget that nations are to be judged 
by the same standards by which individual character 
and worth are estimated. Nothing can be right or 
worthy in the nation which is wrong or unworthy in 
the individual. In national life, as in corporations, 
it is so common for groups of individuals to do what 
the individuals would not dare do, and to hold opinions 
which the individuals at least do not announce, should 
they hold them. Selfishness, greed, excessive luxury, 
indifference to suffering, may be national sins, and 
when found they are as hateful to God as the life of the 
rich man at whose gate Lazarus sat, or of the priest and 
Levite who glanced at the wounded man and passed 
by on the other side. And we are partakers of all 
these sins unless in our hearts we constantly rebel 
against them, and with our voice, our pen, and our vote, 
we contend against them. And all this we may do not 
only in our private life, but as we form part of the 
church of Jesus Christ. Unless the church does make 
its protest, it is not guiltless. 

What concerns us most just now is the effect of all 
[ii6] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

this on our religious life. In that great vision Isaiah 
not only cried, "I am a man of unclean lips," but also, 
"I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." 
Those who would readily admit the influence of na- 
tional theories on an established national Church boast 
that independent churches are free from all such dan- 
gers. When we go into our churches, we go out of 
conditions out of harmony with the Word of God; 
and to some extent unconsciously perhaps, we have 
been during the week influenced by what we have seen 
and heard. We say the Christian should not give him- 
self up to attendance upon worldly amusements, lest 
he injure his spirituality, but, being in the world, he is 
much of the time of necessity in touch with the very 
influences that make these amusements hurtful. Some- 
times the bill-boards announcing the next play hold out 
before his gaze the worst things in the play, and he 
cannot help seeing the bill-boards. Here is the occasion 
for a godly intolerance, a godly narrow-mindedness. 
All the greater things are reached by some straight 
gate and narrow way. 

Certain kinds of so-called religious experiences are 
chiefly of a fleshly nature, and as such retard in no 
small degree a sane and real religious development and 
interfere with genuinely spiritual worship and experi- 
ence. We should be very slow to criticize anything 
claiming to have the Christian life for its end, if there 
is evidence of sincerity of purpose, especially in days 
when the laborers are few as over against the greatness 
of the harvest. We know what physical manifesta- 
tions attended the Wesleyan revival and other similar 

[117] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

movements. But John Wesley did not seek, nor did 
he desire, such manifestations. On the contrary, he 
sought to prevent them, at least for quite a while. But 
what shall be said of those who seek to produce such 
conditions, and seem to think that without them there 
can be no evidence of the presence and power of the 
Holy Spirit? Sometimes unconsciously, sometimes of 
set purpose, they resort to well-known psychological 
laws to bring about a high nervous excitement with 
marked physical accompaniments; and what shall be 
said of tho^e — very many of them truly good — who 
imagine they have lost the testimony of the Spirit, 
unless they are in possession of certain enjoyable, 
emotional excitements? Without bringing any rail- 
ing accusation and without indulging in any sweeping 
criticism, I would call your attention to the frequency 
with which men of this type fall into great sin, not 
uncommonly in the very midst of their supposedly 
exalted experiences, and also to the dangerously 
erroneous theological presuppositions for which they 
contend. This is not the place for any careful study 
of such facts as have been presented, but it will be 
sadly interesting for you at some time of leisure to 
learn the philosophy or psychology of these facts. 

It is not meant to deny a legitimate, yes, and a de- 
sirable connection between the body and the religious 
experience. We have the story of Moses, presenting 
himself with shining face after he had been in fellow- 
ship with God on the mount ; and neither painter, poet, 
nor preacher will ever grow weary of the picture of 
Jesus transfigured until his very garments were aglow 

[ii8] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

with the divine nature within. It is a joy to think of 
saints whose faces announced their saintliness, whose 
hands were tender with the Christlikeness of their 
souls, whose steps going on behind the footsteps of 
Jesus seemed to move with a divine eagerness and 
speed. At the same time, let us not forget that Paul 
speaks of the fading glory on the face of Moses, as if 
this were not the all-important thing, and calls atten- 
tion to the more permanent things in the religious life; 
and that Jesus evidently did not desire his disciples to 
magnify unduly the shining of his person, and con- 
stantly called their attention to the shadow of the cross 
and the pain of true self-denial. If these outward 
appearances show themselves incidentally in connec- 
tion with any deeply-rooted Christian experience, well 
and good. Certainly we shall not then be afraid of 
them or too much resist them. But so soon as we 
begin to seek them, we are in great danger of losing 
what after all is the lasting, uninterrupted fellowship 
with God and the deeper joy that goes with it. Strange 
to say, the results which follow are apt to be very 
much like those which attend excessive ritualism. 

Certain types of premillennialism are certainly not 
helpful to the deeper religious experience. The ques- 
tion as to the truth in the general premillennial posi- 
tion is not raised, for many devout souls who are evi- 
dently in constant touch with God have aligned them- 
selves with this school of thought. It may be that in 
the case of these the spirituality is not because of their 
premillennialism. Jesus made the coming of the 
Spirit, the other Paraclete, dependent on his going 

C"9] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

away. His bodily presence interfered with the larger 
spiritual life. His insistence that Mary Magdalene 
should not touch him, when she sprang impulsively 
towards him as if to clasp his feet, was in keeping with 
this same idea. She must not put so much value on 
the mere recovery of his body whose absence from the 
tomb she has so lamented. Paul urged with great em- 
phasis that although he had known Christ after the 
flesh, thinking largely of his historical career, he would 
now know him no more in this way. No one can 
unduly long for the merely material or physical evi- 
dences of the presence of God, without to that extent 
sacrificing his faith in the spiritual, which is the essen- 
tial life and person of the Godhead. No one can trust 
in that which is visible, without losing the power to 
see and know the invisible. Wonderful are the words 
of Paul: "For our light affliction, which is but for a 
moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and 
eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the 
things which are seen, but at the things which are not 
seen; for the things which are seen are temporal; but 
the things which are not seen are eternal." 

It is possible for us, while looking forward tp the 
victory of the gospel at a coming day by the personal 
reign of Jesus, to lose the consciousness of his pres- 
ence in the world to-day working out his great pro- 
gram. We may seek to save ourselves from some of 
the misfortunes incident to these beliefs by thinking 
of an early return of Christ. But in fact, in spite of 
all the promises of the theorists, he does not come — 
and the days go by. There is no vision of him except 

[120] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

in the history of days long past, or in certain prophecies 
with detailed interpretation. For the most part the 
world is as empty of God as for a Buddhist or a 
Mohammedan. He is expected to come back some 
day. Certainly he is not here in a world rapidly, and 
for the present hopelessly, "going to the bad.'* These 
things are mentioned not in any way controversially, 
but to point out that where views like these go to this 
extreme, we have no right to expect heartfelt worship, 
nor the blessedness of a vital communion with God. 
There is no God near enough to be real. Certainly he 
is not everywhere; and if he is not everywhere, we 
may at last find that for our real needs he is nowhere. 
Whatever we may think with regard to the consum- 
mation of all things, or how it is to be worked out, we 
must have a God ever working, even when we do not 
see him, and learn to have faith in his spiritual power 
apart altogether from all that is material. 

"He hides Himself so wondrously 
As though there were no God; 
He is least seen when all the powers 
Of ill are most abroad. 

But right is right, since God is God; 

And right the day must win; 
To doubt would be disloyalty, 

To falter would be sin." 

The lust of the flesh shows itself in its most unfor- 
tunate form in the various endeavors to use religion 
for ends more or less carnal and selfish. Men go to 
Church and worship and support religion for what they 
can get out of it largely of a material sort. Along 
with that questionable maxim, '^Honesty is the best 

[121] 



WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

policy," they have adopted another, '*It pays in this Hfe 
and the next to be religious." Some African tribes 
have learned just enough about Christianity for them 
to add the cross to their other fetiches, and to treat it 
as such. The professing Christian may be as guilty 
as the savage with a little more of refinement in his 
practices and beliefs. 

In many ways the lust of the flesh presents itself, 
and in every case it stands in the way of the spiritual 
life and hides the face of God. So materialistic is this 
age that multitudes find the worship of God unat- 
tractive. You will note this further fact, that the fin- 
est musical programs, and the most splendid art, and 
the most eloquent lectures on high themes are as unat- 
tractive and for the very same reason. All these things 
are dull because life is so largely built on the lust of 
the flesh. And the cure will come, not by way of 
asceticism, not by the surrender of one or another pleas- 
ure, for other things will come to take their places, 
but by living in our higher, real selves opened wide to 
God. 

The second hindrance to the spiritual life is the lust 
of the eye. We are reminded here of the second 
temptation of Jesus. 'Then the devil taketh him up 
into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of 
the temple, and saith unto him, *If thou be the Son of 
God, cast thyself down.' . . . Jesus said unto him, *It 
is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy 
God.' " The temptation is to show ofif^ to love the 
merely spectacular, the visible as over against the 
invisible. Not even a miracle is of value if performed 

[122] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

for its own sake. When Herod desired Jesus to show 
him what wonderful things he could do, he refused to 
do so. The lust of the eye, the eye lusting, the eye 
cut loose from control and going its own way — ^this 
it is which hinders. 

The eye is a great organ. Marvelous are the beauty 
and the knowledge which steal in through these win- 
dows, walk in through these doors, into the secret 
places of the soul. The educator has learned of recent 
years that not through the ear only, but through eye 
and ear is truth to be conveyed. The greater any bless- 
ing, the greater is the danger. Very well did our 
Master say, "If thy right eye offend thee (cause thee 
to stumble), pluck it out and cast it from thee." The 
eye needs back of it a great, clean, strong, wise soul, 
to control and to use it. If the eye runs away with us, 
if it is used for pernicious ends, incalculable is the 
damage it can work in the man himself or in those 
whom he meets. It seems so self-sufficient. What 
need for more than itself, and the wonders that it 
works? Here are things to be seen, and it is an un- 
usual opportunity. Why not embrace it? Only a 
fool would refuse. If the scene is spectacular, no 
matter whether it be a gorgeous sunset, a snow-capped 
mountain, a beautiful cathedral, an elaborate, startling 
motion picture, a great city fire — ^this is enough, ask 
no questions, go. 

It is well that we take advantage of the eye in edu- 
cation, in religion, in entertainment. But as we do 
so, too frequently the ear and even the mind or reason 
walks out. On the motion picture screen we have only 

[123] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

a few lines, often put together in a bungling way, out 
of harmony with facts and even poorly spelled, and 
then the picture. But what matter if the picture so 
often wholly transient or even hurtful, attracts us? 
The eye's lust has been gratified, but the soul has not 
been helped. Special pleas are made for the eye, just 
because it so largely releases the mind from thinking 
and the soul from seeking God. The truth passes in 
so easily, and the soul finds itself at once satisfied 
in some beautiful religious spectacle, and moral obli- 
gations are so easily accepted through some great 
pageant. 

The eye indeed loves to be deceived, to have some 
skilled man play tricks on it. The magician, the 
sleight-of-hand performer, always gets a crowd, and 
when all is over, what is left? The eye has wandered 
through meandering paths of inexplicable mysteries, 
but its lust has for a while been appeased. How far 
the eye may go in its demands is seen in many extrava- 
gant forms of art, impressionist, futurist, cubist, going 
to eve.y sort of merely spectacular extreme, until 
sometimes, as one looks at such creations the question 
will arise whether one's self or the so-called artist is 
insane. In that second temptation Satan knew, Jesus 
knew, that by that one startling scene properly staged, 
without one word of teaching, more than by all his 
parables, his sermon on the mount, his beautiful life, 
he might secure a host of followers. But there would 
have been no lesson of his kingdom there, and the 
crowds would have been following wonders, and not 
himself, with empty souls. 

1 124] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

From this point of view, even when not in any sense 
immoral, the popular forms of entertainment make 
more difficult the heavenly vision. We read in Paul's 
first letter to the Corinthian Church, "Eye hath not 
seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart 
of man, the things which God hath prepared for them 
that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us 
by his Spirit." But here the thing uppermost in life 
is that which lays all its stress on that which the eye 
beholds, and makes it the one means of obtaining what 
brings the largest pleasure. One who has spent his 
life in looking intently through microscopes would 
hardly be expected to be among the first to see, on the 
distant horizon, the approach of a vessel at sea. It is 
not easy under more normal conditions than those 
which prevail to-day to disabuse the minds of the mul- 
titude of the idea that the vision of the eyes is more 
valuable, more reliable, than the vision of faith. In a 
most sublime passage, Paul sums up a great statement 
of truth, "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, but 
the greatest of these is charity." He can mean only 
this, that faith, hope, love are eternally permanent. 
And yet we are told in sermon and hymn that faith 
shall be "lost in sight," and that hope shall "die in glad 
fruition." These pleasures of ours only confirm us in 
the notion that the visible is the only reality. 

Where stress is laid on that which is pleasing or 
exciting to the eye, and it seems not only right but 
almost necessary that we should give a large place to 
diversions based on this conviction, we shall find nearly 
always at last that a multitude of sins may be covered 

[125] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

by a splendid exhibition. Yes, we must see the won- 
derful spectacle, even if old-time religion and old-time 
morals meet with scant emphasis, and sometimes with 
a measure of ridicule, as now out of date. Indeed 
occasionally the scenes exhibited entertain the more, 
because for the time being the mind and heart are 
shocked, while the eye is in a sense gratified. We 
might in all these cases find an application of those 
very severe words of the Master, used on a very dif- 
ferent occasion and for a very different purpose, 
*' Verily, I say unto you, they have their reward." And 
how subtle is the entrance of the evil! And how 
shrewd is the concealment of defects and of downright 
sin ! The invisible things accompanying the spectacular 
do enter into life at last and work their mischief. Rus- 
kin tells us of a visit to St. Mark's cathedral in Venice. 
While there he was moved to examine the statue of 
one of the doges. The work was finely executed on 
the front, where it could be seen. But the sculptor 
had left the back uncut and had shoved it into a place 
where the unfinished part could not be seen. Ruskin 
tells us that the sculptor, who had been well paid for 
his work, had afterwards run away from Venice a de- 
faulter. Yes, this is a frequent picture of the much 
prized, visible things of this transient world. Hidden 
in all its much admired glory may be imperfections, 
moral wrongs, sins, and these souls of ours, dissatis- 
fied with all except the infinite and eternal, find them- 
selves deceived. 

The modern display of wealth and dress and luxuri- 
ous homes are real menaces to the higher spirituality. 

[126] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

Here is a substitute for manhood, for the divine image 
in the soul. It reminds one of the days, when at 
school our companions or ourselves with pencil dressed 
up the pictures of the great statues of Greece in modern 
garb and spoiled their glory. We did it for fun. But 
to-day the tinsel is in all seriousness substituted for 
the gold of a true humanity. Many there are no better 
than the lay figures on which the garments are hung. 
At a meeting of rotarians and their wives in a certain 
city some weeks ago, the proprietor of a department 
store, for the entertainment of the gathering, had a 
group of young girls to dress up in the latest garments 
of his great store and exhibit the clothes (not after all 
themselves, for they were of Httle worth just then). 
But when not done of set purpose, such is the great 
show, the great parade of the world. And this is un- 
ceasingly before our eyes, until we forget that divine 
nature within, which has in it something of the lasting 
beauty of the Lord and may behold in all its eternal 
splendor God's glory and power. 

And there is a strange unreality about it all. The 
cheek that is rosy and beautiful may have been painted 
so deftly that it deceives the most observant. The dis- 
play of wealth may be a mere veneer for mortgages 
and unpaid bills and sundry other debts. The social 
gathering is most frequently a scene of real discom- 
fort, concealed under forced smiles and the skillful act- 
ing out of assertions of enjoyment. The devotion to 
the laws of fashion in one part of our living is almost 
sure to show itself in all the parts. For unreality, un- 
naturalness, God has no message out of the clouds, nor 

[1273 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

the flowers, nor the song of birds, nor the human race. 
Nor can God speak with any direct message. It re- 
minds one of the young woman, who sat down at her 
piano to practice and found that the younger children 
had muffled all the wires, so that in response to her 
touch not a sound was heard. 

Underneath this display of wealth, the grossest 
things may be covered up. Immorality may be there. 
We are accustomed to speak of slums, where the poor 
and degraded have their homes and their haunts. But 
these are not the only slums. They may be seen, 
where social pomp and beauty reign. Dishonesty may 
be there. Every dazzling light, every glittering gem, 
every artistic gown may be stolen. The skillful ear 
might catch, interwoven with all the laughter, the sighs 
and groans of poorly paid or unpaid sewing women or 
toilers in the mill and factory. 

Most of us are mere lookers on at all this pomp and 
show. Very true, but we are lookers on. We live in 
this atmosphere. We are a part of a social life which 
makes all this ideal. We see multitudes of imitators, 
while other multitudes are trying to *'break into" this 
whirl. Hard it is to be in this world and not of this 
world, to be righteously intolerant of that which so 
largely hushes the voice of God for the world, for 
there is very little of God in what we call society, 
society which is supposed to set the pace for all the 
rest of us. The greater is the problem, in view of the 
fact that all this show of wealth, and what goes with 
wealth, crowds itself into the church. Some things 
in the world we may get rid of, but in this we are 

[128] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

helpless. But let us not forget that there were Chris- 
tians in the household of Caesar, and **even in Sardis," 
were those who had not defiled their garments, and that 
under most untoward conditions they were building the 
kingdom of God. 

You see this same love for the spectacular in the life 
of the people. When we show the visitor the city's 
life and greatness, we point out the sky-scrapers, the 
large department stores, the most striking residences, 
the largest and most costly churches. The moral 
forces, the charities are named only in so far as they 
may find their headquarters in huge piles of brick and 
stone. We recite the huge figures which tell the re- 
sources of the banks. We show the thoroughfares 
filled all day long with lines of automobiles. We plan 
for a greater city with a doubled population by 1930. 
We place at railroad stations huge signs with the words, 
"See us grow." In the small towns as well as the 
larger ones we have our brilliantly lighted white ways. 
Many desire a great navy and a huge army not so much 
for purposes of defense as for display. We must be 
first in everything. Sometimes, in the eagerness to 
make a startling display, the people drive madly to 
moral destruction over temperance and virtue. It is 
insisted that the money cannot be spared that comes 
through vice and the destruction of the higher welfare 
of the people. Here is a madness like the madness of 
the owners of the steamer Titanic, which went to the 
bottom a few years ago, because its owners were deter- 
mined, without regard for icebergs or passing steam- 
ships, to break the record of ocean greyhounds. 

[129] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

Very common is that patriotism which is little more 
than a lust of the eye, eye longing for gratification in 
the state with the same longing which we see in the 
ways of pleasure and amusement. It is forgotten that 
a nation's greatness consists of those same qualities 
which make an individual great. Loyalty seems to de- 
mand adherence to such ideals, when once they are 
formed, and so with few exceptions citizens of all 
classes seek for their country this outward glory, which 
shall dazzle the eyes of the rest of the world, and make 
men everywhere wonder. It is astounding how good 
men dream for their native land dreams they would 
not dare dream for themselves. 

Let us once more remind ourselves tliat there is no 
possible separation between our religious and our civic 
life. When we go into the presence of God, we go 
with all the ideals we have formed elsewhere. It is 
not true that religion and politics have nothing to do 
with each other. True godliness, true worship will 
show their influence in one's politics, and political 
theories will help or injure the religious life. How can 
one expect communion with God, where the lust of the 
eye prevails anywhere in his life? Yes, if it prevails 
in that apparently remote field of civic life, God cannot 
speak to us so as to make us hear. The foundations 
of a nation are the invisible, eternal things, and here 
must be our trust. 

In God's temple it is quite possible to imagine that 
the eye lusting for its own gratification is the soul 
yearning for spiritual things and for God, and to think 
that these longings of the soul are met when the lust- 

[130] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHH* 

ing eye has been gratified. Estheticism may easily 
take the place of religion. Every visitor to Europe is 
moved with v^onder, as he lingers for hours in the 
great cathedrals gazing at their architecture, their deco- 
rations, their pictures, and their imposing worship, 
and listening to the inspiring music. He is pained to 
discover that the people have drifted from faith and 
worship, that corruption has taken hold upon the 
ecclesiastics who go through the magnificent round of 
ritual, and upon the people who live under the very 
shadow of the splendid structures. After all these 
years, what evidences of any permanent good is to be 
seen? Indeed, in many places, it would appear as 
though the one hope for the spiritual welfare of the 
people is in the humble Protestant chapel with its 
most simple forms of worship. The Protestant 
Churches everywhere need to be on their guard, for 
there is ever a great tendency to please the eye rather 
than change the heart of the worshiper, and as piety 
declines, the demand for the gratification of taste be- 
comes more urgent. In all three of the Synoptic Gos- 
pels, with an undertone both of reproof and sadness, 
it is recorded that "as some spoke of the temple, how 
it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, he said, 
*As for these things which ye behold, the days will 
come, in the which there shall not be left one stone 
upon another that shall not be thrown down.* " God 
was to depart from the temple in spite of its splendor, 
as he had given up the kingdom notwithstanding it had 
been planned and founded by himself. 
The spectacle of a great throng produces emotions 

[131] 



WHEN GOD AND IMAN MEET 

which may be estimated of real rehgious value when 
they are not, and the throng may have been gathered, 
as sometimes at evangelistic services, by various devices 
largely out of an ambition to have a multitude for its 
own sake. How often it happens that what has been 
considered true religious fervor fades away as the 
crowd dissolves! On any occasion it is inspiring to 
see a great host united for one purpose and by one 
idea, and most of all when worship is the aim. But 
this is secondary and must not be put first. Jesus may 
have had among other things this in mind when he 
said, "Where two or three are gathered together in 
my name, there am I in the midst of them.'* 

Poor substitutions are ,made. The glory of an 
earthly temple takes hold upon our eyes, until faith 
loses its vision of the glorious New Jerusalem above. 
The Iiundreds gathered in the church blind our eyes 
and deafen our ears to the sights and sounds of that 
"great multitude which no man can number who have 
washed their robes and made them white in the blood 
of the Lamb." The choir in robes standing or sitting 
in response to fixed rules, and the organist with skilled 
hands mastering the organ and directing the singers, 
keep us from gazing at a sublime spectacle, the great 
innumerable host triumphant singing or harping on 
their harps. We imitate and poorly imitate with 
sights, very largely, if not quite, material, the heavenly 
visions granted to devout souls in spiritual things. 
Our worship gets to be so largely acting. We are 
reminded of the trifling things by which behind the 
curtain in the play they imitate thunder and lightning. 

[132] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

The distressing thing about it is that while we do our 
acting, while we imitate, we may and often do lose 
touch with the glorious realities of heaven, the glory 
of the other world begun below for true saints. Luke 
tells us that at the ascension of Jesus the disciples gazed 
steadfastly toward heaven, when two angels said, "Ye 
men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? 
This same Jesus shall so come in like manner, as ye 
have seen him go into heaven." They were gazing at 
a startling, to them, new spectacle. They were miss- 
ing the real glory of their risen Lord, who was the 
same Jesus as had healed the sick, raised the dead, 
comforted the sorrowing and died for human sin. 

But shall we shut out from our churches and their 
worship all that is beautiful, all that is impressive to 
the eye? Shall we follow the Quaker with his pain- 
ful simplicity and the absence of all form? Or shall 
we do as the Hindu, who glorifies ugliness by making 
his deities as repulsive as possible, in order to separate 
them as far as possible from all resemblance to the 
human ? A celebrated preacher has a lecture with the 
striking title, "Is fun devilish or divine?" May we 
not ask the same question in regard to beauty? And 
the answer is the same in either case. God is a God 
of beauty. He is a God of splendor, of glory. To 
make us know all this, how the Old Testament writers 
struggle to find words! If this be true, it must be 
that those who have had a vision of him will seek to 
describe the vision, so far as visible things are used, 
with the most beautiful and most glorious scenes. The 
great cathedrals and the great paintings and windows 

[133] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

are what might have been expected. Yes, they will 
continually be coming, because men have seen the Lord. 
But there are those who have not seen the Lord, the 
lust of whose eyes, still craving the beautiful, takes 
these beautiful things men inspired of God have made, 
and leave out God. It must be as if one greedy of gold 
and pearls and precious stones should make his way 
up through the gates of heaven, that he might have all 
these, and, as he walked the streets of that great city, 
should find no Christ, no God there. And it is not in- 
conceivable, if somewhat fanciful, that men in their 
eagerness to see the glories of that other life might go 
on for a long while without beholding the face of our 
Lord, the supreme object of interest to redeemed men. 
The pride of life corresponds with the third temp- 
tation of Jesus. "Again the devil taketh him up into 
an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the 
kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them ; and 
saith unto him, 'All these things will I give thee, if 
thou wilt fall down and worship me.' " There is a 
great temptation to follow any path that leads to suc- 
cess. The demand is for efficiency. The man who 
"puts it over" is the man who is called for. Undesir- 
able things may be later weeded out. We may attend 
to that later. There is a strange distrust of ideals, 
which are pushed into the background, while they seem 
not to pay, to be brought out at some time in the future 
when there seems to be a call for them. There is a 
strange fear of ideals, a fear of the very God who con- 
trols the world and must bring to completion at last his 
great plan — a fear that he may be against us and so we 

[134] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

must avoid him and his great purposes. "If I trust 
him, my glory, my scheme must be defeated. Yes, 
his plan is too big for me.'* 

It is a mad, wild, crazy life which thus develops. 
It is like a great dash of color, a charivari, a child beat- 
ing the piano, hammering as many keys at once as he 
is able, making all the noise he can. Two boys were 
sitting together one day with a great pile, hundreds, 
of marbles in front of them belonging to one of them. 
The other suggested that the marbles be divided equally 
between them, and that they play * 'whoever gets the 
mostest will be the bestest getter." This is a very cor- 
rect picture of most of the inhabitants of the world — ' 
they do not often get any further, along than this. 
Men seek a fortune. Why? Just to get a fortune. 
Men seek honor. Why? Just to get honor. They 
seek office. Why? Just to get office. The preacher 
wants the big city church. Why ? Just to get the big 
city church. Those piles of material on that great 
lot are not a church, not a palace, not a hospital. Haul 
yet more of the same sort and keep hauling and let it 
extend to the heavens, still you have not the thing 
worth while. Indeed you may have too much material 
— more than half of it in the way. The palace, the 
hospital, the church, either or all of these, are in the 
mind of a great thinker, a dreamer, called an architect, 
and they are there as an intangible thought. But he 
is very foolish who may be unwilling to adopt that 
thought and make the material obey, for fear he may 
lose some of it. Greatness is as much in what we lose, 
as in what we gain. The kingdom of God came to 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

Jesus, because he gave up all the kingdoms of this 
world which the devil laid at his feet. 

Too often the church itself adores mere success, and 
seeks it on the same basis as the world. What does it 
wish? The crowd, the applause of the world, a large 
membership, a popular preacher, to get ahead of its 
rival. Yes, you may find the pride of life in a church 
as truly as in the world. And here again each member 
finds his pride as large, and of the same kind, as that 
of the church as an organized body. Paul met with 
the tendency in his day: "as many as desire to make 
a fair show in the flesh, they constrain you to be cir- 
cumcised; only lest they should suffer persecution for 
the cross of Christ." It was circumcision then, but 
to-day it is something else. In either case the desire 
is for the glory that is to come. With Paul the way 
to the achievement of the highest aims was through the 
loss of all things for the sake of the nobler aim. Of 
Jesus it was said with a sneer, but what a tribute, "He 
saved others: himself he cannot save!" No church 
can be true to the Master in any other way. 

If we are to find God, if indeed we are to worship 
him, then whether in the church or in the world from 
day to day the pride of life, the adoration of success 
must go. How can we ever know God or the ideals 
which center in him if we are afraid of him or them, 
afraid of the results of absolute surrender, entire 
obedience at any risk? It is in loving communion, 
closest, intimate fellowship that we gain any con- 
fidences. Timidity never wins in any great enterprise. 
How widely true the common saying, "Faint heart 

[136] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

never won fair lady." There is a profound psychology 
in the discovery by Paul of Jesus at the hour when 
the cross no longer terrified him. Nor shall we dis- 
cover him unless our plans, our ideals, agree fully 
with his. Otherwise we shall not speak a common 
language, and there will be no common ground on 
which to meet. It is hard to believe that God can feel 
himself at home in some churches and in some hearts. 
In his last hours, in the presence of those who had 
been so long with him, Jesus said he was alone, except 
for the Father. Alas for those churches in which even 
though he may be present, he must say again, "I am 
alone, alone." 

Life's pride nearly always fixes itself on the things 
that are non-essential in character and in religion, and 
indeed in all life. Hear a personal friend: "I am 
getting old. With me life will soon be over. I have 
made good. Look at this beautiful home. Think of 
my social standing. My children are set up in life by 
my efifort, and they, too, are all succeeding. But I am 
not happy, and I wish there had been more in my life 
than all this." Shall we not learn that, as in every 
part of life, failure very largely grows out of wrong 
emphasis, so is it in life as a whole. Life may pride 
itself in an achievement, whi^h while it may show 
energy and skill, is of little, perhaps no, worth. The 
great king of Babylon with great pride said, "Is not 
this great Babylon that I have built for the house of 
the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the 
honor of my majesty." But a voice came from heaven, 
"The kingdom is departed from thee/' The things 

[137] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

he trusted are never permanent. We are constantly 
reminded of Kipling's Eymn: 

"Far-called our navies melt away, 

On dune and headland sinks the fire; 

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre ! 

Judge of the nations, spare us yet 
Lest we forget, lest we forget !" 

The admirable traits of character are to most men 
such things as add popularity. All character ought 
to be not only good, but beautiful, but beauty is not 
an essential. When once it is emphasized, the nobler 
qualities fade. The men most spoken of among the 
so-called best people are not of necessity of the highest 
type. It is not surprising that great popular leaders 
so often fall into great sins. It would be possible to 
give names of not a few who, leading in some great 
moral reform for the glory of prominence and of ulti- 
mate success, have committed crime in those very 
things they professed to despise and sought to over- 
come. Here is one who, in the earlier days of the 
prohibition fight, with an almost insane desire for 
popularity, brought himself before the eyes of the 
church people of his great state by his most brilliant 
appeals, and was found drunk on the streets in the 
midst of the campaign. Here is another who gave his 
spare moments and more from a busy pastorate to a 
movement to protect the morals of the boys of the city, 
found guilty of the grossest form of sexual vice. We 
think of God as the infinite, the omniscient, the om- 
nipotent, the absolute, when himself emphasized his 

[138] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

holiness and love. We interpret him thus in terms 
of the pride of life, and our anthropomorphisms are 
at the same time our estimates of human greatness. 
How strangely slow we are to learn that the cross is 
supreme, whether in God or a redeemed humanity, or 
the universe at large. 

Great ecclesiastical gatherings are illustrative of the 
same truth. What does a great General Conference 
esteem the chief thing? As soon as the bishops are 
elected, along with those who are to fill the other higher 
offices of the church, the members become quite rest- 
less and hear calls to important duties at home. Very 
seldom are such meetings conducive to deep spirituality 
in those who are present or in the church at large. In 
so many ways the pride of life gets into the place of 
control. This is evident at times in the recital of past 
victories, although the claim may be made that all has 
been done to the greater glory of God. Ecclesiastical 
pride is the most offensive and the most hurtful of all 
pride, because with such rich treasure at hand, the 
church magnifies what adds to its outward show. And 
it is apparent why God is not found, for we have a 
partial manhood seeking a partial God in a partial uni- 
verse. The whole man in a world seen whole must 
enter into the presence of a whole God. Then is it 
that spirit meets with Spirit. 

There is no place for the pride of life In the Chris- 
tian life, and so the world tendency being that way is 
against us. The Bible insists everywhere on humility 
as essential. That marvelous picture of Jesus in 
Philippians, to which attention cannot too often be 

[139] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

called, presents him as bringing himself down to the 
shame of the cross, and at no time calling attention to 
the glory of his equality with God. God himself does 
not seek to dazzle men with his glory. He refused to 
let Moses look upon all his light and power and con- 
sented only that he should see his "hinder parts." The 
best revelation of him is to be found in the cross. Of 
course we are not to think of God as not being all that 
God can be, nor of Jesus Christ as ceasing to be divine 
in his great life of mercy. But we must not think of 
God as great for the sake of greatness, as shining 
resplendent for the sake of the resplendence. No; he 
is the servant of his children and all he has and is 
ministers to this end. And the world must know his 
greatness by a personal knowledge of his saving grace 
and not by the outshining of his glory. In the cross, 
with all its darkness and apparent feebleness, we see 
and feel the power of God unto salvation, yes all the 
power in the Triune God. 

The humbling of ourselves by no means involves 
the surrender of any elements of real human greatness, 
nor the speaking of ourselves as fit only to live in the 
dust, and forever unworthy to look up into our Father's 
face. Indeed the right sort of humiliation is the first 
step to knowledge, the first step to true character, and 
to a vital Christian experience. It eschews all the 
merely outward pomp of an exalted humanity and 
seizes upon all tfiat is essential or worth while. It 
gives up forever an imaginary, yet for the moment glit- 
tering, self for the real eternal self made in the image 
of God and redeemed by the blood of Christ. Of 

[140] 



THE HINDRANCES TO WORSHIP 

course, the deficiencies, the weaknesses, the sins are 
revealed. They are not found in God, in Jesus. The 
vision of the perfect life is clearly seen, and towards 
this the soul struggles. Here are the things which 
make us truly human. With this self God has to do. 
Here then is a most inspiring thought — the humbled 
man and God humbling himself meet, and understand 
each other, and hold sweet communion. It is the meet- 
ing of the real God and the real man, and they are 
related as Father and child, and speak the same lan- 
guage. A great failure is that life which, magnifying 
knowledge for its own sake, and personality for the 
sake of the glory of its independence, and rehgious ex- 
perience as a thing to be proud of in itself, seeks God 
in the flash of the lightning, the thunder of his power, 
the miracles of his hands. There can be no com- 
munion with him, no knowledge of him. Those who 
bear the cross, and meet God at the cross, his cross, 
hear God's voice and feel his power in their lives. 
Did not Paul think of this when he uttered his strong 
desire to know "the fellowship of his sufferings, being 
made conformable unto his death." The great shame 
is that eternal beings with eyes for the infinite vision, 
made to live in eternity for the Infinite and Eternal, 
should forsake that which is the infinite in themselves 
for the fleeting glory, and seek the things that speedily 
pass away, the ever fading light upon the face of God, 
that God who often makes his glory fade that he may 
if possible remain to us. That we ever seek the pomp 
and glory is indeed a Satanic temptation. They come 
to us from worship of him. They are all he gives and 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

they quickly pass away. He that doeth the will of 
God abideth and God abideth with him and in him 

"We would see Jesus, the great rock foundation 
Whereon our feet were set with sovereign grace 
Nor life, nor death, with all their agitation, 
Can thence remove us, if we see His face.'^ 



[142] 



Lecture IV 

THE APPOINTED HOURS AND THE 
APPOINTED PLACES 



Lecture IV 

THE APPOINTED HOURS AND THE 
APPOINTED PLACES 

SHOULD there be stated or appointed hours fof 
worship? Is there any need for them if worship 
is the normal life of the soul? Why not make all life 
worship ? Why not, when moved to do so, turn aside 
to commune with the God who is always consciously 
near? That this is the natural life, when we let our- 
selves alone, when the best in us is not spoiled, we have 
seen many proofs. Beautiful are those words of the 
poet Wordsworth: 

"My heart leaps up when I behold 

A rainbow in the sky. 
So was it when my life began; 

So is it, now I am a man; 
So be it when my life grows old. 

Or let me die." 

What is true of the rainbow and of all the other 
more beautiful things of God's creation is true also 
of the God of the beautiful things. The psalmist re- 
joices in beholding the beauty of the Lord. Standing 
at Inspiration Point in Yellowstone Park, a number of 
persons unknown one to another were looking down 
through the beautiful canyon to the falls some distance 
down the river in silence and awe, when all at once a 

[145] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

young woman started the doxology, *Traise God from 
whom all blessings flow," and the whole company 
joined with her in the well-known hymn of praise. We 
are seeing every day in nature, in history, in the cur- 
rent events, as real evidences of God's presence. Why 
should they not move our hearts to adoration ? 

It is interesting that hymns and other poetry are so 
common in the ethnic religions. We should not be 
surprised at this when we call to mind that the de- 
votees of these faiths were seekers after God. The 
most striking illustration is found in the literature of 
the most ancient Indian religion, made up entirely 
of a large group of hymns called the Vedas, "the books 
of wisdom," as the word means. This wisdom is noth- 
ing other than the outpouring of the heart in praise to 
some deity, a nature force among many others, but 
for the time being the only object of adoration and 
praise, in which fact we have already a marked ap- 
proach to monotheism. Many passages in these hymns 
might be used in Christian worship, if we might sub- 
stitute the name of Jehovah for the name of the 
heathen deity. They were after a while aids to a 
purely formal worship, and became the center for a 
very elaborate ritualism and an abstruse metaphysics, 
but with rapture the men who thousands of years ago 
wrote these songs, and they who first sang them, must 
have seen the face of God — a God whom they knew 
only in part — in sun and stars and fire and storm. The 
best of our own Old Testament is the Psalms, as the 
best of our more recent sacred literature is the hymns. 
Often as we go about our tasks, or walk the streets, or 

[146] 



APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

wake from our sleep in the still watches of the night, 
for some reason we can seldom quite explain, some one 
of these ancient or more modern words of praise will 
enter our minds and even take hold of our lips. Per- 
haps our hearts go out in that praise which is so 
normal, and unconsciously we find ourselves using the 
best words to express the mood we may then be in. 
Equally impressive is it that sometimes when all 
faith in creed or orthodox dogmas has been given up, 
there remains a pleasure or a joy in some of the acts 
of worship. A very dear friend who had withdrawn 
from the church some time before, because he claimed 
to be an agnostic, lost his only child, a beautiful little 
girl, under very sad circumstances. While he was 
standing with his face to the wall in the room where 
the little corpse was lying, I put my arm around him 
and heard him amid his sobs and groans, say with deep 
earnestness again and again, *'0 God! O God!" I 
said, ''And you do believe there is a God?" "At such 
a time as this," he said, "you have to believe it, and you 
have to cry out to him." Matthew Arnold, while in 
America, was entertained in the home of a devout 
Episcopalian, who every morning before breakfast read 
appropriate prayers from the prayer-book in family 
worship. The head of the house, knowing Mr. Arnold's 
belief, or rather unbelief, did not have the servant call 
him until after the prayers, but the distinguished guest, 
knowing what had happened, remonstrated, saying that 
he read these same prayers every morning in his own 
family worship. Most of us have read Adam Bed^, 
and have found a peculiar attractiveness in the way 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

in which George Eliot, daughter of a Wesleyan lay 
preacher, describes the beautiful life, the reverence, the 
communion with God of the consecrated Christian hero 
of this remarkable story. We can almost imagine the 
heart of the distinguished author finding itself for the 
moment strangely warmed. A distinguished scientist 
of the last century, whose studies had robbed him of 
his faith in the unseen, tells us that, in the hour of 
darkness which fell upon him, he still found pleasure 
and uplift as he would sit in the church listening to the 
great organ and the anthems of the choir. 

We marvel that a great scientist, accustomed to the 
study of all kinds of mysteries and to the investigation 
and interpretation of closely related facts, and a novel- 
ist, with an almost supernatural insight into human 
nature, should not have understood themselves better, 
should not have seen how their hearts were constantly 
struggling upward in spite of the efforts of their 
reasons to hold them back. It is not at all improbable 
that in not a few cases like these, if the church had not 
insisted that the faith and the worship should express 
themselves through certain ancient forms of worship 
and formularies of doctrine, but had permitted a large 
liberty, the heart might have had its way and ulti- 
mately might have brought the whole life into peace 
with God. Our greatest hope in dealing with heathen- 
ism is that we may be able to encourage the wings of 
the soul to fly upwards, and to give, through the gospel 
of Jesus Christ, such a large and more correct vision 
of the God whom they ignorantly worship that there 
shall be something truly worthy of the flight. After- 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

wards, if they so desire, and quite probably they will, 
they may formulate in terms more or less fixed, at 
least for the time, the experiences which they have 
enjoyed. But what we must most of all desire for 
them is the largest possible liberty to express the yearn- 
ings of what are the very secrets of the soul. 

For ourselves nothing can be more important than 
the preservation intact of the naturalness of the spirit- 
ual nature and of its behavior. Here above all we may 
be ourselves, and ought to be ourselves. What we must 
rely on, wherever we worship and whenever we wor- 
ship, is the desire of our hearts after God and the deter- 
mination and effort to give expression to that desire. 
We must make less of outward or merely mechanical 
stimuli, or of forms made to order for those who would 
fain do something religious, merely because this is the 
becoming thing. There was a large amount of truth in 
the old Quaker position, that we must wait for the 
moving of the Spirit before uttering the word of ex- 
hortation or leading the people in prayer. Their chief 
blunder was that they did not duly appreciate the pos- 
sibility of having the Spirit always present in the 
assembly of the saints and in each saint's heart. 

Like all the fundamental, essential, natural things, 
worship will be, when sincere and real, quite simple, 
without elaborate preparation and without elaborate 
means of giving expression to itself. When words are 
used in prayer, they should be the simplest form of 
speech. The Lord's Prayer is a beautiful illustration 
of this. Nearly all the words in the translation of it in 
our Authorized Version are Anglo-Saxon. The Greek 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

is equally plain. No prayer should be otherwise. A 
pastor of my boyhood used now and then to thank 
God for the hypostatic union and for the great the- 
anthropic work of redemption. Prayer will never be 
grandiloquent, not, even in the popular sense, eloquent. 
How fundamental in human life are motherhood and 
childhood! If we speak of them in daily conversation 
or in poetry or song, no words are proper but such 
as the most ignorant easily understand. You would 
find here too that in our English language the words 
most commonly used belong to that same Anglo-Saxon 
simplicity. Sometimes, without full realization of why 
he does it, the writer or the speaker, unaccustomed to 
such modes of expression before, writes or speaks as a 
little child. The lullaby is the easiest verse, with 
plainest words, and music which every one can sing, 
and yet no song so stirs our very being as this. It 
touches those things within us without which life could 
not remain whole, could hardly be said to be. Of like 
nature is prayer, of like nature is all worship. There 
are beautiful anthems good for a concert which scarcely 
fit into an hour of worship. 

"Prayer is the simplest form of speech 
That infant lips can try; 
Prayer the sublimest strains that reach 
Thy majesty on high." 

Yes, and they are the "sublimest," largely because 
they are the simplest. 

And we do not need to be afraid of making worship 
one of the commonplaces of life, and seek to place it 
off in great occasions and great places. It need not be 

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monotonous in any unfortunate sense. The phrases 
of greeting and friendship do sometimes lose their 
original meaning, but at that very time they are essen- 
tial to our earthly relations and are in every way beau- 
tiful. 

"It is a little thing 

To speak a phrase of common comfort, 
Which, by its daily use, has almost lost its sense. 
Yet on the ear of him who thought to die unmourned 
Twill fall like choicest music." 

These words have become the best coinage of our 
common brotherhood. We could not live without 
them. They give expression to human character at its 
noblest. "Farewell," we say, and '*Good-by," or 
"God be with you,'' "Adieu,'' "With God," "I leave 
you," "Au revoir," "until I .see you again," which I 
am confidently expecting. All these are commonplaces, 
just because they are essential and fundamental. If 
ever worship and above all prayer becomes a part of 
life's daily routine, it is for the same reason. We may 
be sure of the value of the prayers we say each morn- 
ing and evening as we kneel by our beds, just because 
they prove we have discovered the real meaning of our 
lives, as they relate themselves to God, and the value- 
lessness and unhappiness of those lives except in com- 
munion with God. More than beautiful are the stories 
told of men in the highest walks of life, who have con- 
tinued through life to repeat the child prayer, "Now I 
lay me down to sleep," and who have done so, partly 
because they never did reach the day when they felt 
they could do without it. There is a most wearisome 
and burdensome monotony in a cry like the "never- 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

more" of Poe's Raven, but there is a sweetness, never 
lessened by sense of weariness, in the continuous assur- 
ance, "1 love you," "I love you." 

We need no intermediary, no priest, in our worship, 
for the very reason that it is so natural to us that we 
can do it ourselves. Full of meaning is it that no 
religion in its early, simple stage had a priesthood. 
The later days of the religion of India were over- 
burdened with priestliness against which Gautama re- 
belled, but in those days when they sang from their 
hearts the Vedic hymns, each man was his own priest. 
The same was true of the religion of Israel. The 
patriarchs offered their own sacrifices. The priest, like 
the king, was permitted by God in patience with the 
frailties of his people. Christianity had no place for a 
priesthood in its beginning. The New Testament has 
no place for a priesthood now. But a priesthood came, 
and is the dominant factor in the largest part of the 
church to-day. In all these religions, the priesthood 
came when the childhood naturalness and simplicity 
were lost. Every reform which came to any one of 
them was aimed chiefly at the priesthood. Protestant- 
ism in its purer form not only does not recognize a 
priesthood; it does not make any wide distinction be- 
tween the minister and the layman. It teaches most 
emphatically the priesthood of all believers. And there 
is not the same kind of sanctity about the church build- 
ing or the Sabbath or other holy days as was thought 
to linger about temples and the sacred days of other 
religions. How beautiful is that conception of a "City 
without a church," as Henry Drummond puts it, which 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

John presents to us. "And I saw no temple therein; 
for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the 
temple of it." The true priest is the man — ^very often 
what the church calls a layman — with a pure heart, 
with clean hands, with a personal knowledge of God. 
Such a priest, though it may be with faltering, limping 
words, may bring the real sacrifice. During a revival 
I once called on a man to pray, holy but quite rude 
in speech, who on this occasion used language more 
barbarous than ever. At the close of the prayer, I saw 
in the audience a very cultured man whom I had long 
been urging to surrender to Christ. It seemed a great 
blunder that the brother who prayed should have done 
so poorly just then. At the close of the services, the 
cultured man gave his heart to God, and said the thing 
that moved him most was the prayer which had seemed 
to me so regrettable. He had been moved by the sim- 
plicity and the genuineness of this unlettered man, and 
began to be ashamed of himself that with his larger 
knowledge he was still not a Christian. 

There is a priestly element of great value, when the 
ministrations of God's house, by whomsoever con- 
ducted, have in them the interpretation of the desires 
and the aspirations of our souls, for so often we do not 
understand ourselves-, especially the best in ourselves. 
A minister of the Methodist Church tells of a very 
plain woman of his congregation who came forward 
at the close of the services to say to him, "I enjoyed 
your sermon and the music very much to-day. But much 
more I enjoyed your prayer, because you said to God 
the things which all the week I have been trying to 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

say, but just did not know how." Of course we know 
that all during that week God had been understanding 
the prayer she was trying to say; yes, we know that 
"the Spirit was helping her infirmities," and making 
"intercession with groaning which cannot be uttered." 
But it was an unspeakable comfort to her, we can well 
understand, to find words for the deep longings of her 
soul. This good woman was not alone in this experi- 
ence, for most of us have felt the benediction of the 
word in season which has made it easier for us to pray 
and to worship, because it has made us see clearly our 
real spiritual needs. Even then, however, the priestly 
aid does not go so far as to worship and pray for us ; 
it but makes it easier for us to pray for ourselves and 
to worship, because our normal selves have been re- 
leased. We may worship God without the aid of priest 
or preacher and without going to Gerizim or to Jeru- 
salem. In his first epistle John tells us, "But ye have an 
unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things. 
. . . But the anointing which ye have received of 
him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach 
you." 

While worship is the normal life of man, it must be 
always borne in mind that there is need of cultivating 
and training the religious tendencies by constant use 
and by fellowship with others who are religious. We 
say that "a poet is born, not made." But the poet needs 
a large education in the art of poetry as in other things. 
Jenny Lind and Caruso were discoveries in the humbler 
walks of life, and from the first the world marveled 
at their God-given voices, but they had training and 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

constant practice. Of course, in all these cases training 
and practice would accomplish little, unless there should 
be present some native ability. The poet, the artist, the 
musician must be there to begin with. May we take 
it for granted that the religious man is there to begin 
with? Unless we may, we shall have, with all our 
training, what we see in art in the miserable travesties 
on painting on the walls of amateur art schools, where 
there is obedience more or less perfect to rules, but no 
art whatever. We shall have men going through the 
forms of worship with the outward show of reverence, 
imitating the deep piety of genuinely religious souls. 
There may be a few abnormal people in the religious 
realm, as we have them in other departments of life. 
But we must take for granted for ourselves and for all 
others that all are religious. One very important thing 
to be kept in mind is the fact that we cannot be all 
religious in the same way. How different in many 
ways, religiously, were the Roman Catholic Cardinal 
Newman, the Church of England Liddon, the Baptist 
Charles H. Spurgeon, the Methodist Hugh Price 
Hughes, the evangelist Sam P. Jones, but they agreed 
in one thing, their consciousness of God's presence and 
the testimony of the Spirit to their divine sonship. 

The training in the religious life should begin and be 
carried forward at those periods of life and in those 
ways suggested by the devout students of religious edu- 
cation. Much must be made of certain times in the 
young life when it is most impressionable by religious 
things. Throughout all this training there are well- 
known laws which govern. Let us not be disturbed at 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

the thought of tying together the idea of law and a 
supernatural experience. God is subject to law, and 
where law does not seem to be present, it is the result of 
our own ignorance. The laws are divine and ought to 
be utilized by us always for the accomplishment of the 
divine ends. It is a most suggestive fact that nearly 
all of that not very large number who come into the 
church and a genuine religious experience in their later 
years have been trained in Christian homes in their 
childhood, and went regularly to Sunday school and 
quite frequently to the Church services as well. The 
oft quoted Roman Catholic saying is wisely put, "Give 
us the child during his first few years and you may 
have him the rest of the time." It is more than prob- 
able that in nearly all the cases where men appear to 
be utterly non-religious, it is because the religious train- 
ing was neglected at the critical period of their lives. 
But we must not despair for ourselves or for others — 
even in the most unpromising cases. We know how 
in other departments of life men who have had no 
early advantages, under the right kind of training, in 
hands peculiarly skillful, often almost miraculously 
develop latent powers which might justly have been 
considered not only dormant, but dead, and become in 
not a few instances famous in some chosen activity. 
So is it with the religious life. Those who have 
been in the ministry for a number of years can recall 
such miracles of grace. 

This cultivation of the religious life must go on 
throughout life. We have no more right to expect 
religious strength without exercise than to look for 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

strong healthy bodies without the proper use of the 
muscles. Unwise every way is the tendency with many 
good people to fix their eyes on past joyful experiences 
to the disregard both of the present and of the future 
possibilities. Painful beyond words are the experiences 
of those who, once living as in the presence of God, are 
now joyless, and wander about as orphans under the 
very shadow of the Father's house. If they might find 
it possible to sing at all, they might find no more appro- 
priate words than these which Cowper has given us : 

"Where is the blessedness I knew, 

When first I saw the Lord? 
Where is the soul-refreshing view 
Of Jesus and His word? 

What peaceful hours I once enjoyed! 

How sweet their memory still ! 
But they have left an aching void 

The world can never fill." 

And this may come to pass as completely by over- 
emphasis at some other place in our natures. The 
student at school or out of school diligent in investiga- 
tion, the very busy business man, even if perfectly hon- 
est in all his business dealings, the lover of pleasure, 
though the pleasure may be in every way innocent, may 
find themselves suddenly some day having within no 
response to the voice of God. The ideal life is that 
which has all departments continuously developed each 
in harmony with all the rest. Shakespeare has well 
expressed in his Hamlet the possibility and danger 
of the neglect which grows out of over-emphasis : 

"Thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

So far as religion is concerned, the whole life must 
equally be open to God. 

Where the religious life is neglected, except on few 
occasions, these tremendous forces of the soul may 
break loose and show themselves in numerous fanati- 
cisms. The wild cries and mad contortions of the 
Mohammedan dervish, as Allah takes possession, are 
the direct result of the conception of God which places 
him far away from his creatures, an Oriental poten- 
tate. Fanatical holiness sects, Christian Science, Spirit- 
ualism might not have disturbed the peace of Zion, if 
God and the other world had always been very near, if 
the souls of professing Christians had always been 
kept in perfect tune with the Infinite. It is a well 
known fact that in all the history of the world, among 
all well-developed peoples, the periods of doubt have 
almost invariably been periods of superstition. It 
would be well to learn that the best way to prevent the 
spread of all such errors is not through controversy or 
bitter opposition, but by supplying those things lacking, 
which the error has, because of a measure of com- 
mingled truth, partially provided. 

We meet quite frequently with the idea that we may 
restore to ourselves some former exalted experience by 
resorting to methods once used, but now very largely 
laid aside, — singing without instruments or choir, 
mourners' bench, old-time class-meetings, and such 
like, none of them in any sense to be criticized in them- 
selves. Usually the results are quite disappointing. Do 
we not remember how the brazen serpent, to gaze on 
which was to secure healing from the bite of the ser- 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

pent in the wilderness, not only lost its power in later 
days, but became an idol interfering with the very life 
of the people, and having received the contemptuous 
name of Nehushtan, **a piece of brass," was finally 
destroyed? It is indeed true that 

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 

And God fulfills Himself in many ways, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 

After all it is not the fault of the custom that it cor- 
rupts. It is because the world blunders in the use of 
the custom and in its expectations from its use. Some 
means of grace are needful. What they shall be is not 
a matter of great importance, except that they shall fit 
the man who uses them, and shall not be substituted for 
the grace itself. They must be the means by which 
the soul exercises itself towards godliness and develops 
itself so that it may never lose the vision of God, and 
may each day have a larger vision than the day before. 
There can be no greater need than the creation of 
reality in all our religious life. The religious life must 
be as vitally, as naturally, a part of ourselves as eating 
and sleeping and the conduct of business. The demand 
for genuineness runs through all the fundamental 
things of life. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans, 
among many injunctions of intensely practical value 
urges, "Let love be without dissimulation," that is 
"hypocrisy" or "acting." John in his first epistle ex- 
horts, "My little children, let us not love in word, 
neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth." It 
is a sadly familiar truth that love and friendship, 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

and marital and parental and filial relations are 
often merely formal things, conducted it may be by 
approved regulations, but like the acting of parts on 
the stage by skilled actors. Here we have truly grave 
problems. Friendship, for example, may be beautifully 
present in its outward glory on an ocean journey, at a 
picnic, in the club-room, or at an afternoon tea, but 
absent in some business transaction or in some great 
financial straits. Marriage may be for monetary con- 
siderations, for purposes of convenience, or still worse 
for the relief or satisfaction of passion, while on the 
surface every demand of God's Word and of civic law 
seems to be met. We know full well with what severity 
the Master condemned the Pharisees of his day for 
their hypocrisy or acting, for mere formality, without 
genuineness and without any evidence of the effect of 
their professed faith on their daily conduct. The 
teaching of Jesus was not merely a condemnation of 
this unreality; it was also an effort to lead men into 
the assurance of the reality of those things about which 
the Pharisees so glibly talked, and for which they made 
such elaborate rules. Himself was condemned largely 
because he lived a life of reality, and spoke of the 
things of the kingdom as verities. We cannot associate 
with him long without feeling that God is a personality, 
in his works, yet apart from his works, that he is in- 
deed all that is meant by the word Father. We are 
walking with him and hearing his voice. But when 
Jesus speaks of any of these things in the hearing of 
the great religious leaders of his day, so unreal, so 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

almost uncanny is it all to them, that they accuse him of 
blasphemy and at times say he has a devil. 

We must be ourselves in our Father's presence, not 
dressed in robes made for the occasion. The great 
advantages of the publican over the Pharisee was here. 
He came as a publican, which he was, and made no 
other claim. We must not be afraid to be found there 
thus. We are to come with our peculiar doctrinal 
views, thinking it may be with some of the ancient 
heretics, because we can think no other way about it, 
not claiming an orthodoxy we do not have. We shall 
never know how much hurt has come to many good 
souls, because the order of the church has seemed to 
require of them that they should adopt certain state- 
ments of faith. We are to come with our own Chris- 
tian experience, however unlike it may be to those 
recitals we may have heard from the lips of certain 
enthusiastic saints, or on the other hand, however un- 
reasonable it may be to those who must reach every 
conviction by way of some kind of laboratory. We 
must come with our own preferred mode of worship, 
if this be possible, but without any claim that it is the 
only way. The Nonconformists of England did and 
said many very foolish things, but we owe them a 
debt of gratitude for the claim they made for the rights 
of the individual conscience, and their refusal to submit 
to the command of the Church to observe its forms 
and ceremonies. So they brought back to the church 
which rejected them, as Methodism also did, the reality 
of God, and Jesus Christ, and the testimony of the 
Holy Spirit. The millionaire and the king are neither 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN IVIEET 

of them to be envied. Most of us at times have pitied 
them. Loaded down with duties and social require- 
ments, and more or less elaborate ceremonial demanded 
by their position, they seldom enjoy life, and find the 
dearest of associations interfered with by the require- 
ments growing out of what may have been considered 
at first their great good fortune. 

The ideal Christian life will pass without awkward- 
ness from the toil of daily life and life's pleasures to 
worship, and from worship back again to the pleasure 
and the toil. In a little New England town opposite 
a home in which I was receiving delightful entertain- 
ment, I noticed in the early morning the wife of the 
town banker with her servant busy at the week's wash, 
and she was doing it well. That evening she enter- 
tained a number of guests at dinner. She prepared 
and served a most delightful meal, at which she pre- 
sided with perfect grace, after which, seated at the 
piano, she rendered the most beautiful music. Through 
it all she was the same woman, going from one task 
to another with perfect ease and with perfect pleasure. 
In a European art gallery there is a well-known paint- 
ing which represents a company of angels just arrived 
in the kitchen of a monastery, helping the monks in 
the preparation of the supper. The point in the pic- 
ture is that the angels seem perfectly at home, as much 
so as the monks themselves. Paul, in his second epistle 
to Timothy, writes, as you well remember, in eloquent 
words of his departure so soon to be accomplished, 
and of the crown of righteousness which awaits him, 
and then, after a few other words of information and 

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request, asks for such commonplace things as the cloak 
which he left at Troas, and the books and parchments. 
He evidently felt no inappropriateness in the bringing 
of these things together and that, too, in an inspired 
writing. 

Gur greatest temptation is to think of all life in the 
terms of the material, the things of time and sense, 
because these engage most of our attention, and then 
the religion becomes an unpractical addendum, beauti- 
ful, but beautiful as the evanescent rainbow or the 
fast fading flower. A distinguished lecturer on his 
way to the hall sat just behind two ladies on the street 
car, one of whom was on .her way to market to re- 
plenish the larder ; the other was expecting to hear the 
lecture, and told her companion the subject, "Keats 
in the Kitchen." The immediate reply was, *'What 
are Keats ?" The object of the lecture was to show the 
place of culture in the most menial work of life. Now 
the lady who asked the question knew as well as her 
friend, as well perhaps as the lecturer, who Keats was. 
But life just then was only marketing, and that over- 
shadowed every other idea and ideal. The wondrous 
beauty of the poetry of Keats was transformed into 
some kind of appliance to make cooking easy, or to 
wash and dry dishes without labor. The spiritual life 
of the church may be forgotten in the big business 
which centers there, and the very mention of its name 
may at once call to mind the numerous collections, the 
annual budget, the employment of a soprano, or the 
purchase of a new organ. And there is an inevitable 
tendency, just because our chief worship is within 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

walls cut off from the world, to think of all religious 
life as of an entirely different sort from other experi- 
ence, and thus to cast an unnaturalness about that 
which is the most natural of all our acts. 

Our religious life is in greater need of nothing than 
the proper realization that all is sacred and all is 
secular. Very few of us ever entirely rid our minds of 
the idea that the world is of necessity under the con- 
trol of some evil power, or at least not under the gov- 
ernment of God. The saints have therefore quite often 
felt it to be necessary, in order to be holy and to com- 
mune with God, to withdraw as far as possible from 
the world. The history of the monkish life has dem- 
onstrated the folly of such a program, for worldliness 
has climbed stone walls, and opened barred doors, and 
enslaved the occupants of establishments, built under 
the shadow of a cross, and filled daily with chants and 
incense. Those who cannot afford to withdraw from 
secular toil have engaged in it as a temporary necessity, 
much to be regretted, and have imagined that in some 
measure it is inevitable that their conduct should be 
shaped by principles a little less than ideal. Some go 
so far as to say, "When in Rome we must do as the 
Romans do," which not infrequently means, "While in 
Satan's world we must do as Satan directs." A widely 
spread theology would have us believe that the world, 
as it is to-day, is necessarily and unalterably bad, and 
can be made good only by some cataclysmic change to 
come at a time more or less near at hand. Many of 
the noblest preachers spend their Sabbaths in denounc- 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

ing everything except religious acts and sacred places. 
They are ever warning their people : 

"We should suspect some danger nigh 
Where we possess delight." 

A distinguished clergyman of the English Church has 
said that in some churches, after he has heard the 
sermon, he has felt it would have been quite appropriate 
to have substituted for the opening sentence of the Te 
Deum Laudamus, "We praise thee, O God, we 
acknowledge thee to be the Lord," the words, "We 
praise thee, O Satan." Such pulpits seem to proclaim 
the almightiness of the Prince of the power of the air. 
Who made the world? Who set in operation the 
forces which are used in manufacture and in the vari- 
ous forms of locomotion? Whence originated the 
economic and industrial laws which govern in all com- 
mercial relations ? Who gave the soil and the seed for 
our crops ? There is but one answer, and that answer 
assures us of the sanctity of all life, of the presence 
of God in all our affairs. We should take up every 
piece of work with reverence, as if handling the sacred 
vessels of the Lord, and every noise of trade and 
factory should be a hymn of praise to God. If ever a 
different voice is heard or a different purpose felt, it is 
not due to anything in the world itself, but to men who 
think they may do what they please with it for their 
own selfish ends. The retributions which nature visits 
on the man who uses her forces in the wrong way are 
the strongest proofs of how divine they are. Mr. 
Babson tells us there is no need for business depression 

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WHEN GOD AND ]MAN MEET 

or financial panics, and that whenever they do come, it 
is because of dishonesty, extravagance, and luxurious 
living during a period of prosperity immediately pre- 
ceding. Indeed it is here in the activities of life that 
the moral and religious truths have their best expres- 
sion. In the church we have theory, ideals, models for 
living. In the shop and factory and office we give a 
body in which these ideals are to live, and through 
which they may give a tangible expression to them- 
selves. It is remarkable in what eloquent manner the 
truth is proclaimed by the businesses of the world. A 
gentleman, coming to a city on Saturday and expecting 
to remain over Sunday to hear a friend preach, said 
to this pastor, when he found he had to return unex- 
pectedly, "I am sorry I shall not hear you to-morrow, 
but this morning I visited Mr. H. in his place of busi- 
ness, and this was as good as going to church. I never 
look up at his great place of business, that I do not 
feel that I am in the presence of God." We often speak 
of the sanctity of the shadow of the church spire, and 
the blessing it brings to the tempted and tried man 
along the street. It ought to be equally true of the 
factory chimney and the department store. 

That all is secular is evident — not secular in any low 
sense of that word. What we call supernatural is 
under law, law which we do not understand or even 
see, but must know when we have a clearer vision. 
What we call miracles may be combinations and uses 
of laws of which as yet we are entirely ignorant; in- 
deed quite probably they are. It is God's world, and 
he knows how to combine and use in ways altogether 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

his own the most common things. In our religious 
Hfe, in worship, and in Christian service, we employ 
things wholly material. Our churches are built of the 
same brick and stone, according to the same mechanical 
and architectural laws as the residence or the store. 
The electric power which lights the church or pumps 
the organ bellows, or opens the pipes to the air which 
gives the sound, is the very current which lights the 
city streets, or moves the machinery of the factory. 
The preacher uses the same laws of rhetoric and logic 
and employs the same words as the member of con- 
gress, debating a proposed measure, or the lawyer 
pleading the cause of a man accused at the bar of 
justice. The Bible can speak of heaven only in material 
terms. We read of gates of pearl and streets of gold 
and walls and harps and thrones. The church needs 
money and is conducted on its business side exactly 
like other business. Religious experiences are guided 
and controlled by the same psychological laws by which 
all other mental operations are conducted. When Jesus 
would open the eyes of the man born blind, he anointed 
his eyes with clay made of spittle, and sent him to the 
pool of Siloam to wash. This man was not guilty of 
Naaman's great mistake, when told to dip in Jordan 
seven times in order to be cleansed of his leprosy, think- 
ing that the healing would come by means wholly super- 
natural. 

There is an apparent danger in this way of thinking. 
We may drag down things spiritual to the low level 
upon which we have placed in nearly every case the 
secular life. The preacher becomes a common lecturer. 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

The choir sings for entertainment. All sorts of catch- 
penny schemes are resorted to for the purpose of rais- 
ing money. The costly church is erected because the 
rival denomination has one. Worship and other church 
obligations are discharged like the duties of daily life, 
to be attended to indeed, but to be gotten over with a 
sigh of relief. What we must do is to lift up all that 
is secular to that place which in our thinking we have 
given to things supernatural and divine. The incarna- 
tion of the Son of God, begun in a supernatural or 
virgin birth, received in part its consummation in the 
carpenter shop at Nazareth ; and on a cross redemption 
was completed. 

When the secular and the sacred are thought of as 
distinct and far apart, there is always a wrench more 
or less painful in going from one to the other. It is 
not at all surprising that a child in the primary depart- 
ment of a Sunday school, after hearing the stock 
description of heaven, should have cried out in pain, 
"I do not want to go to heaven," or that another child 
upon being shown the angels in Raphael's Sistine Ma- 
donna should have asked with deep solicitude, "When 
I get to heaven, won't I have any feets." Nor is it 
strange that after a busy week, we so often fail to get 
any pleasure or comfort out of the Sabbath, or that 
after a very glad season of worship on the Lord's Day, 
we feel an unaccountable sense of discomfort on the 
next day in the office or store, in the very recollection 
of the uplifting experience. We must learn better. 
We must think of work and worship as the stepping 
from one divine task and experience to another. 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

Whether on the Sabbath or the week day, we must in 
the evening be able to sing the same song : 

"One more day's work for Jesus, 
One less of life for me! 

But heaven is nearer, 

And Christ is dearer 
Than yesterday to me. 

His love and light 

Fill all my soul tonight." 

We worship so poorly on the Sabbath, because we 
worship so poorly during the week. It is done too 
seldom and too much apart from life's realities. We 
are like the young man picked up suddenly from his 
plowing in the field, dressed in evening dress, and led 
into the midst of a gay and fashionable party. He does 
not know what to do with himself. He has more feet 
and hands than he can well manage. We can but ask 
ourselves, what would such do if called to enter the 
company of heaven. Surely they would not feel alto- 
gether at home. We must keep at our worship until 
we feel perfectly comfortable with God, and feel we 
should not be startled if heaven were to open as for 
the men of Bible times. Here can be seen the im- 
portance of those many opportunities and forms of 
worship on all the secular days — the prayer-meeting in 
the middle of the week, the family devotions morning 
and evening, and the hours spent in private prayer and 
meditation. One of the most saddening things of our 
modern life, with all its haste and worry, is the neglect 
of one or all of these things, or the performance of 
them in the most perfunctory and an almost meaning- 
less way. There is a tendency in these moments of 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

simple worship to miss the excitement and inspiration 
of choir and organ and great throng, and to think that 
God is not quite so near. They are dull moments to 
be gotten over hurriedly, as mere obligations to be 
met, like the payment of taxes or the weekly dues in 
the beneficial society. This is as absurd as to imagine 
that the sweet fellowship of husband and wife, or 
parents and children at meal time cannot be perfect, 
except on the occasion of some more extravagant 
spread as at Christmas or Thanksgiving Day. On the 
contrary, it may be, whether at the more elaborate 
meal or the more elaborate worship, we shall be like 
Martha cumbered with much serving, while the experi- 
ence of Mary may be reserved for the sweeter sim- 
plicity. 

Who can estimate the value of the downtown church, 
kept there in spite of the fact that the residences have 
been changed to another part of the city? Its very 
presence leads many a busy man, many a shopping 
woman to breathe a prayer. Most impressive in this 
regard is old Trinity Church, looking down Wall 
Street, the center of the world's monetary life. Still 
better is it that such a Church, as is true of Trinity, 
should be kept open all the time, inviting Into itself 
the passer-by to rest and pray. The chimes, playing 
the tunes of the church at stated hours, call all who 
hear to pause and think of God. Very popular is that 
simple picture of the Angelus by Millet, in which the 
peasants bow their heads in the midst of the field where 
they are toiling when they hear the church bell ring 
in the village near by. The Mohammedan sets us a 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

never-to-be-forgotten example in the custom of prayer 
five times a day, no matter where he may be, in re- 
sponse to the voice of the muezzin calling from the 
minaret of the mosque. It is a good thing to keep near 
us some book of devotion, not only in our homes, but 
in the places of daily toil, the Episcopal prayer-book, 
the hymn book of our own Church, the Imitation of 
Christ on which so many saints have fed, and others 
that might be named. A few lines read in the midst of 
our daily concerns will feed our souls, will make us 
think of God, and bring him very near. Rich in 
blessing will be the services of the Church on Sunday 
to that one who has filled the busy hours of the week 
with communion with God. 

It is better if, in addition to this constant inter- 
mingling of our daily duties with prayer .and church 
bell, and religious meditation, there shall be a striving 
upward to God on the wings of every deed, as we 
seek through all our work to reach the throne of 
Jehovah or to tell the world the meaning of the Christ 
life. In some department stores the day begins with 
prayer and the reading of the Scriptures. But what 
of the wage of the girls? And what of the honest 
service of the girls? How much of God is there? 
How much adoration of God ? In some shops services 
are held at the noon hour. To what extent are these 
shops giving expression to the principles of the gospel? 
How much are they striving until Christ be formed in 
them? How is it possible to find God on one day 
of the week if all the rest of the week we have been 
denying him, or violating his law, or finding no place 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

for his real presence in our toil, however much we 
may speak his name, or keep up the semblance of 
adoration? Life must not, cannot be divided. It must 
be all Christlike, all divine. It may be a hymn of 
many parts and every range of voice may be in the 
chorus which sings it, but it must be one song and 
the voices must not be discordant. When Dvorak, the 
Hungarian composer, visited America some years ago, 
he was greatly pleased with our Southern plantation 
melodies and charmed his friends, on his return, with 
his enthusiastic rendition of them. Later on, breaking 
these airs into fragments and collecting them around 
a theme of his own making, he created the beautiful 
and popular Symphony of the New World. Even so 
must we with the cross, Christ's cross, God's cross, for 
our theme, gather about it all the commonplaces of our 
lives, until all shall be the Symphony of the Kingdom 
of Heaven. 

And what is true of the business life must also be 
true of our study, our research. We find here avenues 
to God. If doubts have dogged our steps all the week, 
we shall have doubts while all around us are fervor 
and faith in the temple of Jehovah. Unless we have 
adored God in the laboratory during the week, or seen 
him moving through the pages of history, there will 
be a small probability of our discovery of him as we 
gather with the great congregation. Unless we find 
him everywhere, we shall in no rich, full sense find 
him anywhere. It is indeed a wondrous worship which 
a devout scholar presents. With a vision of God 
throughout the vast stretches of the universe, a vision 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

of knowledge, and faith where knowledge has been 
first, he comes to that higher knowledge where faith is 
supreme, and with a larger vision looks out upon that 
same universe. He can indeed say now, *'I am think- 
ing God's 'thoughts after him." 

"We have but faith: we cannot know, 
For knowledge is of things we see; 
And yet we trust it comes from Thee, 
A beam in darkness : let it grow. 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell: 
That mind and soul according well 

May make one music as before, 

But vaster." 

The ideal religious life is discovered to us in Paul's 
injunction, 'Tray without ceasing." We must be 
always ready — ready for worship — ready for the hands 
of God. This will mean the renewal of our inner 
natures. Not God himself can get music out of some 
lives. During an unusually wet summer, while the 
organist was away, the woodwork in the great organ 
of my church became so swollen that the substitute 
organist one Sunday morning after a vain endeavor 
to make music, gave it up. At the close of the services 
a fussy little woman pressed her way to the front and 
insisted that the playing was intolerable, and the reg- 
ular organist must be brought home forthwith. I re- 
plied, "Yes, it will be a pleasure, as it always is, to 
have our beloved organist with us, but to-day even he 
could not have made music on that organ.'' It is so 
common for us to blame the discords from our souls on 
God's providences, or on our unfortunate environment, 

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WHEN GOD AND IMAN MEET 

or the trials and sorrows of life, when the fault is in 
us. We need souls renewed by God and daily renewed. 
Great cathedrals keep some one employed to be in their 
organs every day, so that the organist will have noth- 
ing to do but bring the music out. So many in our 
congregations are frequently wandering away and 
needing to be restored. In very many revivals the 
number of reclamations exceeds the number of con- 
versions. These souls of ours are very delicate instru- 
ments, and need constant watching by some expert, and 
God alone knows what is in man, and can keep man 
right. Our Master said, "If thou bring thy gift to the 
altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath 
aught against thee ; leave there thy gift before the altar, 
and go thy way ; first be reconciled to thy brother, and 
then come and offer thy gift." Nothing is to be gained 
in merely going before the altar, tlie right hfe must go 
there. 

God alone can get the music out of our souls when 
they are renewed. So many seem never to have an 
opportunity to show what is in them, just because the 
only hands that strike the keys are business associates, 
men and women of the world, unfaithful clerks, or 
exacting employers, servants, or mistresses. The story 
is told that on a Sabbath evening an organist was play- 
ing the postlude as the people were filing rapidly out 
of the church, when a stranger stepped into the organ 
loft and asked permission to try the organ. As he 
played, the people remaining in the pews fell back into 
their seats, and those at the door and in the aisles 
returned to their accustomed places. He played until 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

past midnight and no one left. At last, he turned to 
the church organist and said, "What shall I do to get 
them to go?" The organist replied, "Let me play and 
they will leave." And so it was. And so with us, God, 
and the world. We are in the world, but our citizen- 
ship is in heaven. We are in the world, but not of 
the world. If the world is divine, it is divine as it 
shines with heavenly light, as it receives its interpreta- 
tion and its final shaping by heavenly laws. For the 
world is dependent on God who made it, to bring its 
music out, and it too needs reshaping and reorganiza- 
tion, before it is ready for him to use it. The miracles 
of Jesus have their lessons for us here. The world 
was defective when Jesus came, but it responded to 
his touch and then rejoiced in his presence. But at 
its best the world must not control our lives. We are 
greater than the world, and only God is greater than 
we. So many men resemble the hotel piano banged on 
by every passer-by, never revealing its sweetness and 
always out of tune. Now it is a part of a street air, 
and now a fragment of a hymn, now it is a snatch or 
two of some opera or oratorio, and now a bit of rag- 
time — and none of it played well, none of it complete. 
W^hen once the soul has known the transforming 
power of God and has his continued presence, every 
act and word are but expressions of the life within, 
a life which is now indeed the life of a child of God. 
Praise may be uttered just as truly with the plow or 
hammer as with the organ and the hymns, and prayer 
may be presented in the continuous effort to give ex- 
pression to the character of Christ in all the conduct, an 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

expression which is self-expression, because the Christ 
Hfe is implanted deep within. There will be times 
when we shall need for our worship things less ma- 
terial, things with but slight connection with this tem- 
porary material existence, and we shall find these best 
in the well-appointed church. In more exalted experi- 
ences the figures I have been using are hardly appro- 
priate. The soul mounts up without material aids. It 
is like the lark which, though it builds its nest on the 
ground in the midst of dangers, soars on highest wing. 
To ordinary eyes there may appear to be two or three 
diflferent kinds of life, but not so, they are all one, and 
he who has thus enjoyed them knows this is true. They 
are but changing expressions of the same life. One 
day the mother is busy mending the clothes of her 
little boy, and every stitch has her heart in it ; another 
day she is dreaming dreams and making plans for his 
great future ; yet again she holds him in her arms and, 
as she hugs him passionately, feels, as she says, as if 
she could break every bone in his body. It is all the 
same love of a tender motherhood. The patriot pays 
his income tax willingly to support his government, or 
denies himself luxuries or perhaps necessities in the 
time of war, or when the flag of his country is unfurled 
stands at attention, while the national anthem is sung, 
and then rends the air with his huzzas. It is all the 
same patriotism. So there is but one love for God, but 
one adoration of his greatness, but like his own revela- 
tion to us, it may go forth in many ways and in many 
portions. 

When w£ have learned these truths and have put 
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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

them into practice, we go through life flinging out 
music in all directions. We are like great churches 
whose chimes and organ and hymns sound forth the 
notes of joy and inspiration to weary men and women 
who never enter, and we do not need to be constantly 
calling men to the better Hfe. We are calling them 
by the very way we live, as church buildings are mes- 
sages of truth and grace. But when we do speak or 
sing, there is a reality about it, because with all its 
supernaturalness it is free from unnaturalness, and 
seems to have its origin under the miraculous touch of 
the Holy Spirit, out of those experiences which are 
incident to all practical life. 

Contact with men, through the practice of this larger 
worship awakens in them the same consciousness of the 
immanence of God and the same desire for the daily 
personal fellowship with him. It was said of Coleridge 
that, whenever he went into a company of friends, he 
so stirred their intellects that new creations of their 
genius might be confidently expected. The same was 
said also of Goethe. But more do those whose souls 
are in tune with God quicken others to the same con- 
stant praise and prayer, and unison with the divine 
mind and heart. It has often been said, that if on 
the busiest street one man will stop and look intently 
upward, the rushing throng will stop and look. So he 
who in the higher spiritual sense looks towards the 
heavenly things will bring many to join him in the 
rapturous gaze. 

We must have our stated hours of worship. This 
is well not only in our church life, but also in our 

11771 



WHEN GOD AND IMAN MEET 

private devotions. All religions have had appointed 
hours and seasons and places. Most noteworthy is the 
place of the Sabbath in the life both of the Jewish 
and of the Christian Church. The Word of God urges 
us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together 
as the manner of some is, and all the teaching of the 
Bible is in thorough accord with this injunction. The 
custom of all really good men confirms the value of 
this rule. They have regularly appeared at the services 
of the church. All of them as far as possible have 
gathered their families together at fixed hours, and in 
the same way have attended to their private devotions. 
The lives of all such have proved the value of regularity 
in our religious life, as much so as in our physical life. 
Upon them the church leans in all its more essential 
work. Some there are who attend the church but 
little, except when the revival season is on, and they 
appear to be strangely warmed and do their share in 
bringing warmth to others. They are not useless, they 
seem to have their places, but the church would die if 
it depended on them. One of the great troubles in 
the church to-day is that not more than thirty to forty 
per cent of the membership of any local congregation 
attend the services of the church with a fair degree of 
regularity. The churches that are well-attended for 
purposes of sincere worship are usually the deeply 
spiritual churches, spiritual continuously with daily 
conversions, and not spiritual merely on certain great 
occasions, under almost abnormal circumstances and 
methods. What is true of churches is true of individual 
Christians as well. The periodically reclaimed are not 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

of the number of those who are always in their seats, 
whenever the doors are opened. 

There are times when we feel but little like going 
to church, and this is true of other periods of wor- 
ship; and we may have thought that it would be well 
if we might perform these duties at such times only 
as our hearts move us. We may have feared the for- 
malism by forcing ourselves to such tasks. We may 
have seen a danger in doing the thing just for the sake 
of doing it, of keeping up a habit. This is unquestion- 
ably the wrong attitude. A study of the religious his- 
tory of men will show that real backsliding comes in 
this way as commonly as in any other, if not more 
frequently. Watch the new convert. At first he never 
misses the services of his own church and, in addition, 
he enjoys similar occasions at the Young Men's Chris- 
tian Association, the Salvation Army, and elsewhere. 
After a while, you miss him from the prayer-meeting, 
and then from the Sunday night services. Then he 
thinks it enough if he goes to Sunday school in the 
morning, and sees no reason why he should stay to 
church. Then he gives up the Sunday school and the 
Epworth League. Meanwhile, if you might know his 
private life, you would find the same neglect in his 
prayers and the reading of the Bible. Perhaps a yet 
greater intimacy would reveal a sad moral slump in his 
character. The enjoyment of our religion decreases in 
the more favorable moments, and more favorable 
moments grow fewer, by neglect of such hours as seem 
for the moment to have but slight promise of spiritual 
blessedness. Indeed there comes at last an awkward- 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

ness, an unnaturalness in our religion, and it becomes 
easier to give up things at one time essential to our 
happiness, though we may not altogether sever our 
connection with the people of God. 

The facts are all against the idea that it would be 
better to worship only when we want to do so, or 
when some great sense of need comes over us. And 
analogy would seem to lead us to the same conclusion. 
The savage eats his food when he can get it. For days 
perhaps he is on the verge of starvation, because he 
has failed utterly in the chase. At last he is successful, 
and he eats to excess. This means early decline in 
health and strength, and shortness of days, and at the 
same time a minimum of enjoyment. The cultured 
man has his meals three times a day and, as far as 
possible, at the same hours. The mental food must 
be taken in somewhat the same way. It is a sure road 
to intellectual decline, to yield to the weariness of the 
flesh, when summoned to some high mental task which 
would mean the larger development of the brain. Nor 
dare we let long periods of intellectual idleness be per- 
mitted. We may lose the power to think worthily at 
all, and pass beyond the possibility of recovery. It is 
not the occasional exercise of the body, conducted it 
may be more or less energetically, but the carefully 
planned day by day training of all the muscles of the 
body, under the direction of some expert, that keeps 
the body in good trim for the varied activities of life. 
The very heavens about us, the world under our feet, 
keep up their life by rules somewhat similar. The 
seasons come and go with interesting and instructive 

[i8o] 



APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

regularity. Winter may be severe and appear as if 
it were going to last forever, but the snows and the 
ice melt, the rivers flow, the warmer sun shines, and 
the buds swell and burst, and the flowers and fruits 
gladden all hearts. God brings forth everything in its 
time. 

If there is any virtue, as we believe there is, in the 
gathering of God's people, in the communion of saints 
for purposes of worship, we may very well ask, how 
we are to have it with the uncertainty as to whether 
there will be few or many or any at the meeting for 
prayer and praise and fellowship. And while it is 
true that where two or three are gathered together in 
Christ's name, he is in the midst, for it is the Master's 
own promise, we all know how hard it is not to be 
discouraged, .when we have had a right to expect 
many in the sacred gathering, and find only the two or 
three. What would become of the family worship, 
unless the family know that at certain hours all are 
expected to gather at the throne of divine grace. Is 
there not a peculiar joy in the consciousness, that at 
the stated hours of our personal communion with God, 
we are joining a great company at the one common 
mercy seat? Our religion is not individualistic; it is 
social or nothing, and the whole tendency to look 
upon our religious life with a sense of utter independ- 
ence is in the anti-social and therefore anti-Christian 
spirit. 

The Church is a divine institution. In a very true 
sense it is God's vicegerent on earth. Surely it has the 
right to appoint for those who belong to the fold the 

[i8i] 



WHEN GOD AND IMAN MEET 

seasons for prayer, and these seasons have added to 
them a new meaning, and may we not say a new power, 
by the very fact that they so gain their place in our 
rehgious life. We may very well think of them as 
appointments made for his people by God, and we 
ought to accept them as such. If they are appointed 
by him, we have a right to expect the appointed bless- 
ing. A minister, speaking of a trip he made around 
the world, said he found himself calculating the time so 
as to find the exact hour on Sunday and Wednesday 
when his people would be gathered for worship. Some 
of these hours would be in the night, but he would 
nearly always awake at the right time. And so he 
joined with his congregation in worshiping God. He 
says that these hours were the happiest in his life. 

The congregation is called together not for worship 
only. The people are there being mobilized for service 
and for warfare. In this sense worship is preliminary 
to the real work of life. How can the representative 
of our Lord and King give direction to his forces and 
utilize the inspiration which comes out of the realiza- 
tion of the divine presence, if his soldiers and servants 
are not there? 

As we look towards the appointed place and time, 
the expectation that we shall meet God counts for very 
much. He is in the stars and in the rocks and flowers. 
He is there where the mill grinds the flour or weaves 
the cotton. He is on the crowded streets. He is 
everywhere — not a sparrow falls to the ground with- 
out your Father. But our minds are not expecting 
to see him or to hear him, and so we miss him. It is 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

like the preoccupied man, our dearest friend, it may 
be, who passes us on the street and does not see us. 
It was said of a very distinguished bishop of the 
Episcopal Church, that he did not know his own wife 
and children on the street, so busy was he with his 
high and holy thinking. We may find an application 
for the story so frequently told of the Englishman, who 
going to India to hunt tigers said on his return that 
he had not seen a single missionary during all his 
journeys through that most interesting land, and who 
was reminded that he had gone to India to find tigers 
and not to find missionaries. It may be as bad as 
that with man and God in this busy world. The man 
may be so busy and God so far away, although at the 
same time so near, that he may see not God, but only 
dust and dollars. And there are experiences so sadden- 
ing, so wretched, that they lead those passing through 
them to say God cannot be here, the squalor and gaunt 
hunger of the slums, the darkness of some unusually 
crushing bereavement which does not lead one with 
Job to search for God on the right hand or on the left, 
but one takes for granted there is no use to do so. 
There may be not only the desire, but the determination 
to go even to his seat, and with throbbing heart and 
anxious tread, we go to the place where he is ever 
expected to be, and at the hour when faith is expected 
to bring him into view. We expect to find him and not 
often are we disappointed. 

The daily lives of many very good people are so full 
of care and labor, so very busy, that religion is neg- 
lected and crowded out, and will be permanently 

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WHEN GOD AND IVIAN IVIEET 

crowded out, unless there are urgent calls to worship at 
special hours appointed for that very purpose. Even 
as it is, pleasure and business are encroaching more 
and more on religion, and are in very many places seek- 
ing to rob us of our Sabbath. The busy Christian 
worker, pastor, deaconess, city missionary, going about 
what is beyond doubt the Master's business are in 
danger here. Unless they put into the plan of their 
lives hours for worship in private and for faithful 
attendance on the church, hours to be held inviolably 
sacred, they will find themselves doing the appointed 
work which will be no less mechanical or secular than 
any mere business, and will suddenly awake to see that 
they have lost God. Yes, this may be true of the pastor, 
to whom preaching and all the rest may be so entirely 
just his business or profession, that he does not feel 
the divine presence and does not take time to be alone 
with God at other hours. There is a pulpit eloquence 
of rare attractiveness with no manifestation of God's 
presence, and which brings no one, not even the 
preacher, .nearer to God. There was no room for 
Jesus in the inn, not because there was any opposition 
to his mother having with her babe a comfortable 
place there, but because there was such a crowd that 
filled the place ahead of Mary. We may be willing to 
have Christ with us, but often he cannot find an en- 
trance, because the place has already been preempted, 
and probably preempted by things not in themselves 
bad, bad just because they keep God out. We must 
make a place for him. 

Places and hours become a part of our religion as 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

much as h)aTins and stained glass windows and organ. 
They are means of grace. It is most interesting to 
study the history of shrines and other holy spots. 
Legend and many forms of error have at times stolen 
in. But we may find here ladders on which to climb 
towards God. The Hebrew people never ceased to 
find a charm about Bethel and they thought of their 
Jehovah as the God of Bethel. The church of our 
childhood, where we sat with our parents, were con- 
verted, and received into the fold, retains its hold on 
us, humble as perhaps it is, and we never feel quite 
so near to God as when we worship there. Do we not 
pause now and then, and meditate at that very evening 
hour, when our mothers taught us about Jesus and 
gave us our lesson in prayer, until we feel our eyes 
growing moist with tears, and the air seems full of 
angels? These experiences find their counterpart in 
that renewal of patriotism which every loyal American 
makes as he stands at the tomb of Washington at Mt. 
Vernon, or in that hall in Philadelphia where our 
forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence. 
Or we are reminded of the charm which lingers about 
the places to which we look back after years of happy 
wedlock, where the troth was plighted which ended in 
marriage. All this grows out of our human nature and 
human nature at its best. Unfortunate. indeed is the 
man who has no shrine at which instinctively he bows 
the knee. 

We have what to-day we call our dates with friends. 
Why shall we not have our dates with God ? Yes, why 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

not? He condescended to make covenants with his 
servants in the ancient days, and in those covenants 
bound himself by promises pledged by signs. In the 
sacrament of the Lord's Supper we have a constant 
reminder of the covenant between Jesus as the repre- 
sentative of God, God's Son, and his followers. The 
bread and wine pledge him as well as those who 
partake of it. It is neither irreverent nor fanciful to 
think of his keeping his engagement at the hour ap- 
pointed in the trysting-place. Why should we not say 
on Saturday evening, the preparation for the Sabbath, 
"Lord, I expect to be at eleven o'clock to-morrow 
morning at the First Methodist Church, and I ask that 
you meet me there, as thou hast promised to be with 
thy people always"? Try this some time, sincerely, 
reverently, and go expecting he will keep his engage- 
ment, because you have kept yours. The indefinite, 
general invitations of those who say, "Come around 
some time, just any time, and take a meal with us," 
do not find the response in many hearts like that which 
says, "A few friends will be with us Friday night at 
seven o'clock at tea, and I wish you in the number." 
How joyful to think of God's saying to us, "On 
Wednesday night I shall be at the prayer-meeting to 
talk with you. Meet me there." Gracious, wonderful 
was that outpouring of the Holy Ghost on the disciples 
on the day of Pentecost, which came through expecta- 
tion and obedience to a request by Jesus for an engage- 
ment, "Tarry ye in Jerusalem, until ye be endued with 
power." They kept their engagement and God kept 
his. 

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APPOINTED HOURS AND PLACES 

"I know Thee Saviour, who thou art, 
Jesus, the feeble sinner's Friend! 

Nor wilt thou with the night depart. 
But stay and love me to the end : 

Thy mercies never shall remove; 

Thy nature and thy name is Love." 



[187] 



Lecture V 
THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 



Lecture V 
THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

LET us now consider the joys of worship. The 
Scriptures evidently would have us think of joy 
as the normal experience always. They open with 
the assurance that "God saw everything that he had 
made and behold it was very good.'' They record the 
triumphant strains of the writers of the Psalms, as they 
contemplate the glorious works of God, the enforce- 
ment of his laws for human happiness, his mighty, and 
living presence in the un foldings of history. The 
coming of Jesus into the world sets all heaven and all 
earth to singing. 

"Down through the portals of the sky 

The impetuous torrent ran, 

And angels flew with eager joy 

To bear the news to man." 

That evils are in the world is not for a moment 
denied ; on the contrary it is emphatically asserted. But 
such a condition does not need to be, and is abnormal. 
We find no doctrine of dualism on the sacred page. 

If we have the right to expect joy at all times, we 
should look for our highest rejoicing in that supreme 
hour when we commune with God. That joy is not 
looked upon generally as the necessary accompaniment 
of worship is quite evident. In a hymn, the peculiar 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

appropriateness of which seems to master a goodly 
number of pastors, Joseph Hart would have us sing: 

"Once more we come before our God; 
Once more His blessings ask: 
O may not duty seem a load, 
Nor worship prove a task." 

We hear Nehemiah and Ezra saying to the people 
in their day, "Mourn not, nor weep. . . . Neither 
be ye sorry: for the joy of the Lord is your strength." 
And Paul the prisoner writes to the perplexed and 
persecuted Philippian Church, "Rejoice in the Lord 
alway: and again I say, rejoice." There are many 
sources of joy, but the only joy which is real and per- 
manent and which includes within itself all other hap- 
piness worth while, is the joy which comes from God 
and is rooted in God. 

Happiness never comes by seeking it. The man of 
the world will tell you what a will-o'-the-wisp it is. 
He thinks each search for it may bring success, and 
so he keeps on trying. The writer of the Book of 
Ecclesiastes tells us how his experience in seeking 
happiness for himself constantly brought him vanity 
and vexation, until he learned to "fear God and keep 
his commandments." It is just as true of worship 
that we shall not find the joy we desire, if we go to 
church or to our closets with this as our one aim. Most 
of us have attended services where from beginning to 
end, every possible effort was made by the leader to 
stir a very shallow emotionalism. The hymns selected 
were devoid of any real thought, possibly made up of 
a mere jingle of words set to tunes well suited to the 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

purpose for which they were used. The prayers were 
scrappy and little more than sound. The text was a 
mere string for the collection of incidents amusing, 
pleasing, pathetic. We are at times reminded of certain 
meaningless social functions, where each assures the 
other that she is having a delightful time, and where 
there is little else than the constant repetition of this 
and a cup of tea. 

Happiness may be sought by turning the hour of 
worship into an entertainment where the weary mind 
may be diverted and refreshed. The building is made 
as pleasing and comfortable as possible. A choir of 
well-trained voices is secured and a delightful program 
of music is artistically rendered. Under their leader- 
ship, the hymns of the day are sung with Hfe and zest. 
With well-trained elocutionary skill the preacher reads 
his lessons, and both prays and preaches with a rare 
eloquence. A prominent minister of our own church is 
reported to have said, *T feel as though I were a 
French cook, studying all the week to prepare homi- 
letical viands which will satisfy the exacting spiritual 
appetites of my people.'' Yes, and if this be our am- 
bition, the appetite both for the sermon and the rest 
will be more and more exacting, and less and less sat- 
isfied. 

A peculiar joy comes for the time from great, enthu- 
siastic gatherings, like conventions of a certain type, 
or union evangelistic services. The multitudes are 
there before the doors are open day after day, and 
there is a season of what certainly appears to be a great 
spiritual uplift. Was there ever such gospel music? 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

Was there ever such preaching? The sentiment of all 

hearts is 

"My willing soul would stay 

In such a frame as this, 
And sit and sing herself away 
To everlasting bliss." 

The meeting closes, the choir is scattered, the evan- 
gelist departs, and great numbers feel a peculiar 
emptiness in their religious lives. The things, in every 
vi^ay good, seem to have failed. The people went seek- 
ing religious joy, religious entertainment ; they found 
it, but it v^as evanescent, because they had no higher 
aim. Or the religious life they lived during these 
memorable days was but the echo of the songs and 
exhortations of singers and preacher. It was not their 
own experience, but the experience of others that for 
a while made them happy. They were humming the 
inspiring tunes all the day long, deaf to the noise about 
them, but they were rather like the sounds from a 
player piano. The sounds may have been their own, 
but not the music. There is a good old maxim which 
says, **Sing your own song." Better is the music which 
we beat out ourselves, our very own, than much sweeter 
music we repeat parrot-like from others. Better a 
creed, however small, which we have worked out, until 
we know that it is for us the very truth, than whole 
volumes of orthodoxy which some one else has cre- 
ated, and to which we have affixed our names, as if 
on dotted lines and by order of some assembly. 

There is the strange joy of the ascetic who pursues 
his asceticism or so-called self-denial for the sake of 
the pleasure he finds in it. There may be in it the 

[194] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

further happiness which comes from loneliness or sepa- 
ration from the world. Most of the anchorites whom 
we have pitied need pity, not because of the sufferings 
they endured, but rather because of their non-human 
traits. Not a few others — not anchorites — who may 
be classed with them, and who in their way are quite 
religious, are ever seeking pleasure in pain, in crosses 
largely self-made, in forsaking the ways of the crowd. 
In life as in the theater some prefer tragedy to comedy. 
Blessed are they who, in order to achieve the ideals 
of God's kingdom in themselves and in the world, 
endure the cross and despise the shame. In the hours 
of their most exquisite agony, they may possess their 
most exquisite joy. But they have been seeking the 
kingdom and not the cross and the shame. There are 
those who while they may have their brief season of an 
Easter joy, for which they seem almost to apologize, 
spend most of their days in sight of the intensest 
agonies of the cross. They remind us of the Church of 
Rome, which while it hangs the sacred place for a few 
days at Easter and at Christmas with garlands and 
bright altar cloths, keeps ever before the gaze of its 
people the tortures of the crucifixion, the bleeding heart 
of Jesus, and the face of the Mater Dolorosa, and 
offers daily sacrifice of the bloody body of Jesus in 
the mass. Of necessity a joy like this must fail at last. 
Not many can endure for any length of time the bloody 
sweat of this gladness. There may come at last the 
darkest pessimism or the reaction to worldliness or even 
uncleanness. The history of certain forms of mysti- 
cism furnishes not a few examples. 

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WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

In Christian Science and kindred theories we find 
the seeker for joy trying to persuade himself that 
the opposing things of pain and sorrow and even sin 
are only phantasms, that matter, the seat of evil, does 
not exist except as a bad thought. These convictions 
are reached by a mental discipline which is more akin to 
Buddhistic than to Christian method. Such a Hfe may 
weary itself in its endeavor to reach its goal, and when 
the goal is reached must find its joy imperfect, because 
it has disregarded so many essential facts. 

The world by searching does not find God. The 
world by searching does not find joy. But he who 
worships in spirit and in truth finds the everlasting 
God and with the everlasting God eternal joy. But 
how? And why? 

The hour of worship brings with it the release of 
all that makes us men. It is the hour of liberty. We 
know how bondage gives unhappiness, and liberty 
brings boundless joy. The very idea of liberty brings 
joy. How the motto of the French Revolution, **Lib- 
erty, Equality, Fraternity," ran from village to village, 
from city to city, until the great hosts of the hungry 
and oppressed leaped for joy! It is said that the night 
before the slaves in the West Indies were granted their 
freedom they sang and shouted the whole night 
through. Here is the secret of the spread of anarchy 
and other radical ideas. Men are expecting release 
from the slavery of capitalism, from the prison-house 
of modern industrialism. We enjoy the camp in the 
mountains away from the haunts of men, in spite of 
the absence of present day conveniences, because we 

[196] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

can be ourselves and are free from the restrictive re- 
quirements of the society in which we move. This is 
a large element in the happiness of the man returned at 
evening from his office after a busy day, his shoes 
exchanged for slippers, his coat for loose dressing-sack, 
in the midst of his wife and children, whom he loves 
and who love him, with book or magazine in his 
hand, by his fireside. This is about all the truth in the 
cry, ''Back to nature," and the world has accepted 
many erroneous interpretations of this cry, just be- 
cause it has felt the stirring of deliverance from some 
of its chains. The meanings of all this are very simple. 
Liberty means simply the right to be one's self as God 
meant us to be. The living of our normal life unre- 
stricted is itself joy. There is no need of artificial 
devices. Indeed the rapid increase of forms of enter- 
tainment is one of the many proofs that most men 
are not free. 

Our religion speaks much of liberty. Jesus Christ, 
the Son of God, who is the truth, said, "Ye shall know 
the truth and the truth shall make you free.'' Paul, 
who gloried in the freedom the gospel had brought 
him, wrote to the Galatians, "Stand fast, therefore, in 
the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and 
be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." A 
number of things interfere with that Christian liberty. 
Our creeds, valuable and useful as they are, created in 
days when Christian thinkers had a special genius for 
doctrinal statements, would often clip the wings of 
our faith or imagination or shut us up in some gilded 
cage for our own safety. Perhaps we have been find- 

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WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

ing great comfort in the thought of a sympathizing" 
God, suffering with us in reality in all our sufferings, 
and we have felt the burden of distress roll from our 
shoulders, when all at once we are told that we dare 
not think of the great God as suffering, and we hear 
of a heresy by the startling name of Patripassian. On 
Christmas day, not forgetting the divine side of our 
Lord, we are finding special joy in meditation upon 
his human nature as so like our own, when some one 
reminds us that we are moving unconsciously, yet 
surely, in the direction of Unitarianism. We are re- 
joicing in the love of God, when we see once more 
the danger signal in the hands of some faithful servant 
of the church, and we are urged to bear in mind that 
holiness and justice are the place of emphasis in the 
character of God. 

Denominationalism has very much the same effect. 
For the present, so far as we can see, for a long time 
to come, we shall have our various churches, with their 
different beliefs and forms of worship and ecclesiastical 
organizations. Undoubtedly they have been used by 
God for large, beneficial results, and will still serve his 
purposes in the days to come. But the church of God is 
larger, much larger than any one denomination, and 
the gospel is richer and fuller than the combined doc- 
trinal statements of all of them. It is quite natural for 
us to feel that we should be loyal to our own church, 
which in all probability is also the church of our 
fathers. We do our best to crowd our religious think- 
ing within the compass of its teaching, at the expense 
of divine longings which live in our souls. It may be 

[198] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

we see truth our minds crave in some other denomina- 
tion, and we must needs ask ourselves whether it is 
right for us to receive it, for our own has denied it, 
and from the lips of its teachers we must receive our 
instruction. 

Advancing science brings to us some new discovery, 
some new interpretation of the old facts of life. We 
feel the need not of surrendering any vital truth, indeed 
any truth at all, but we do see that there must be some 
reconstruction of our thinking, some rearrangement, 
some change of emphasis. Again we have hobbles put 
on us by some of the best saints, perhaps we put them 
on ourselves. **The faith once for all delivered to the 
saints" must be protected against every sort of ques- 
tioning. Withal we must hold *'the form of sound 
words." One jot and one tittle must not be taken 
from the old statements, which have served the church 
so well for many generations. On the other hand, that 
same science, having spent its time in dealing almost 
exclusively with physical phenomena, may after a while 
begin to doubt the existence of spiritual phenomena, 
so that when we seek instruction in the ways of nature, 
we find our teachers putting chains on the feet of our 
heavenly dreams, lest they carry us too far afield. 
Going into the laboratory of a biological friend of 
mine some years ago, a friend who had given up his 
faith, I found him head down peering intently through 
a microscope, so intently that I stood for some time 
hy his side without his knowing any one was near. At 
length I laid my hand on his shoulder and said, "I see 

[199] 



WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

what is the matter. You are always looking down and 
not up.'* 

The demands of the social life in which we live 
abridge our liberty. Our gospel says, "Our citizenship 
is in heaven : from whence also we look for the Savior, 
the Lord Jesus Christ : who shall change the body of 
our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto his 
glorious body, according to the working whereby he is 
able to subdue all things unto himself." The world 
with which we have to deal in our business, pleasures, 
politics does not believe in ideal things. It claims to 
be practical, and frankly tells us that if we are to have 
a place in the actual working of things, we must adjust 
ourselves to what is possible here and now. In many 
ways it forces us, by the very size of its majority to 
yield to its demands, and we in that very act submit 
to a measure of bondage. This bondage is the more 
painful and the more destructive of our happiness, be- 
cause with all good men the longings for the heavenly 
life still struggle for expression and appear entirely 
practicable. Bondage is not nearly so destructive of 
happiness, if meanwhile we do not know it to exist. 
This is the reason why the many sedatives of the world 
are so popular, and we so often seek them, to drown 
our religious yearnings, which constantly demand at- 
tention. 

The hour of worship brings the liberty for which 
we long, and with the liberty comes the joy. In those 
moments we are in the presence of God, and no priest, 
no theologian, no social leader stands between us and 
him. We are our own priests, presenting our sacrifices 

[200] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

in our own way ; our own theologians, no longer afraid 

of being accused of heresy; and the makers of ideal 

commonwealths, which we see by the eye of faith 

realizable in the future. The physical universe becomes 

aglow; with a spiritual meaning. 

*The earth is crammed with heaven 
And every common bush afire with God." 

Read the best books of devotion, study the language 
of devotion, examine the hymns of the church, the 
universal church. You will find all full of the very 
best theology, but almost entirely free from dogmatism. 
All of it is the common possession of all the denomina- 
tions. And often men who in the world outside made 
gods of the so-called practical things, or had serious 
doubts about any of the unseen things, find in these 
nobler thoughts a strange, almost inexplicable, satisfac- 
tion for their better selves. In the presence of God, we 
are beholding the great facts. In the world we are 
giving our human interpretation of the facts and trying 
to fit them into the merely human schemes. It is the 
difference between the blazing sun holding the planets 
in place, opening the flowers, bringing color to the 
pale cheek of the convalescent, killing bacteria, paint- 
ing pictures, and the disputes about sun-spots, the inter- 
pretations of the origin of the great orb and its place 
in the heavens, the investigation of its many other 
mysteries, and the study of only a few of its rays in 
some laboratory by a physicist. In the hour of wor- 
ship we have all of God and God has all of us. We 
have the liberty of the children of God, and our hearts 
bound with heavenly joy. 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

Not only is the whole self set free, but we enter upon 
our inheritance of the universe, made ours by the 
redemption of Jesus Qirist. One of the chief causes 
of unhappiness is the crowding of us in by the narrow- 
ness of our environment. Although we are citizens 
of the eternities, we find ourselves living in small apart- 
ments ; sometimes it is impossible to get light and air. 
With rigid economy we find it hard to feed and clothe 
our families. Our knowledge of things, in spite of all 
the aids we can summon, is of their surface. The 
unseen world seems far away — we know little or 
nothing about it save as Jesus has dropped a word here 
and there. Meanwhile we see hosts of men, many of 
whom seem altogether unworthy, gaining more than 
their share of the resources of the earth and not in- 
frequently gaining it by dishonest methods, used at 
the expense of the welfare of the masses of the people. 
We are often like children reaching out our hands to 
grasp the sun and moon. If "the earth is the Lord's 
and the fullness thereof," then we must have rights 
there as yet not recognized. We are kings who have 
been dispossessed both of our throne and our estates. 

But there comes to us the message of God's Word, 
**For all things are yours ; whether Paul or Apollos, or 
Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things 
present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are 
Christ's ; and Christ is God's." This was written by a 
man, who either made tents for a living or lived on 
gifts from the people, to a people whom he had 
reminded of the plainness of their origin and their 
life. It is sufficiently comprehensive; it embraces all 

[202] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

we should like to have. Such a conviction or certainty 
does not come to us out of the dirt and sweat of toil, 
out of our poverty and ignorance. No, this is the vision 
of an ecstatic, before whose gaze for the time at least 
much that seems to us most real in life passes away, and 
the invisible appears in sight. Such visions are given 
us, when engaged in worship, we find God and hear 
him speak. The world has a new meaning for us. It 
is indeed God's world. It has its spiritual side, and the 
spiritually minded man owns it. 

There is an ownership which is no true ownership. 
We have seen men, who had paid for the most expen- 
sive seats at the performance of some great orchestra 
go fast asleep in the midst of a wonderful number. We 
have known a man at the cost of hundreds of thousands 
of dollars to build a house, fill it with beautiful rugs 
and furniture, have some expert decorate the walls, 
gather into it paintings and statuary the choicest ; and 
then because he was wholly materialistic get neither rest 
for his body nor refreshment and refinement for his 
soul. A well-known painter, painting a striking moun- 
tain scene, was laughed at day after day, and now and 
then jeered at, because he saw something worth paint- 
ing in those rocks, which to the natives had always 
been rocks and nothing more. 

There is just as unsatisfactory an ownership of 
knowledge. Tennyson looked into the same startling 
facts which led Darwin to write his Origin of Species 
and Descent of Man, Huxley his Lay Sermons, Tyn- 
dall his Fragments of Science and Spencer his Synthetic 
Philosophy, but Tennyson gave us his comforting and 

[203] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

inspiring In Memoriam, which has strengthened the 
faith of so many troubled souls, because Tennyson 
had a real hold on the facts and came into possession 
of truth to which the eyes of these great scientists were 
blinded. It was said of a certain distinguished scholar, 
some years ago, that he had so much knowledge, he 
did not know what to do with it. This may be true of 
any kind of wealth. In all such cases the man is owned 
by his possessions — he does not even own himself. 

In the hour of worship we begin to see the real 
meaning in the world as we are related to it. We are 
in the world to find here our development and enrich- 
ment as the sons of God. As Tennyson puts it, 

"Man as yet is being made." 

Very true, and the world is the factory in which 
God completes a work begun, and only begun in our 
birth and ordinary living. You may be working in a 
mill where some exacting owner or overseer requires 
of you unreasonable labor at unfair wages. It may 
turn out that the owner or overseer comes away from 
his task with pockets full of gold, but with a hardened 
soul, with ears deaf to all the music around him. But 
you may have found there the very training which 
made a hero and saint of you. The problems of 
thought, which rob some great scholar of the hope 
of immortality and the consciousness of God's father- 
hood, for another are the occasion of larger faith and 
brighter hope and nobler character. "All things work 
together for good to them that love God," and that 
good is our sonship to the Lord God Almighty. In 

[204] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

the moments of rapture we see ourselves, not as we are, 
but as we are meant to be, and all the universe, mys- 
terious as many of its workings are, ministering to the 
completion of a plan which is our own dream and am- 
bition now. 

Our little world grows larger too. It loses its 
narrowness and bitterness. The small apartment is 
now one of the many mansions, and the trying petty 
business is a piece of the heavenly machinery. When 
one stands in the cell of Fra Angelico, monk and 
painter, of whom it is said that he beheld things never 
seen before on land or sea, there comes the recollection 
how when invited to make his home in the palace of 
the man who then ruled Florence, he declined because 
he was afraid the luxury and dissipation might spoil 
his art. The narrow ugly cell becomes very beautiful, 
and there comes a vision far beyond of angel forms 
and redeemed saints in glory. We think of a young 
man who held a place as a common servant in a home 
of wealth, and had his dwelling-place in a small room 
in the basement. There was but little culture or refine- 
ment in the life of the home, and all was for display. 
But wealth had brought to its walls a few real master- 
pieces, and as the young man spent his time in dusting 
and otherwise cleaning, his eyes would wander to these 
paintings, until their beauty mastered his soul, and one 
day he found to his surprise that he too was an artist. 
His little room in the basement was his first studio. 

While we worship God, we become a part of a great 
company who adore him. We join the song of heaven 
and heaven seems very near. The things which we 

[205] 



WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

before desired seem trivial now, the palaces of kings 
and the vast industries of the capitalists look like huts 
from the high flight to which the wings of faith lift 
us. If now we read Paul's great message to the 
Corinthians, "All things are yours," we are moved to 
say these so-called treasures of men are not worthy to 
be considered here. Beside rubies and diamonds 
what is rock crystal? This heavenly life is not alto- 
gether hidden behind great walls somewhere. The 
New Jerusalem comes down where we are, and the 
tabernacle of God is with us, and his presence makes 
our wealth. 

"Thy presence makes my paradise, 
And where thou art is heaven." 

And with this presence of God must be our likeness to 
him for which all things exist. John gives us a con- 
ception of heaven the most blessed of all, *Tt doth not 
yet appear what we shall be. . . . We shall be like 
him," and of this likeness we may also sing 

'The men of grace have found 
Glory begun below." 

The epistle to the Hebrews gives us this account of 
our present possible fellowship, "But ye are come unto 
mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the 
heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company 
of angels, to the general assembly and church of the 
firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God, the 
Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made per- 
fect." The church itself is not only the house of God, 
it is also the gate of heaven. Through this portal 

[206] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

we behold and hear the unseen. We walk through the 
gate into God's great heavenly outdoors, and enjoy 
fully the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. 

The world is after all not a material something any 
more than a gallery of statuary is material. It is a 
spiritual world ; the material simply bodies forth these 
great spiritual ideas. In our daily life we are tempted 
to see only the material; in our worship we feel that 
we have all the week been living in the midst of spirit- 
ual forces and did not know it. The very stones of 
the wilderness now appear as a stairway to heaven 
trodden by the feet of angels. 

The hour of worship brings the harmony of all our 
powers. The opposite condition is the secret of very 
much of our unhappiness and restlessness. The soul 
is one constant battlefield, on which what might be 
called a civil war is waged. Paul describes most elo- 
quently the strife between the flesh and the spirit. But 
we have a further conflict between the intellect and 
the emotions, between the will and either of these. 
It is very hard in a psychological study, in spite of the 
scientific atmosphere in which we carry forward our 
work, to keep from thinking of our souls as divided 
up into three or at times more than three divisions, 
sustaining at the best no more than a treaty relation 
one with the other. And there is the conflict ever on 
between the idealisms of religion and the moral law, 
the idealisms of poetry and of new and better common- 
wealths, and the realities and practicalities which we 
face in the counting-room and in the halls of state. 
How familiar this is to those of us who have tried 

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to reform outward civic and industrial conditions! 
In our own lives we feel the battle which we are help- 
ing to wage without. We know full well the wide 
chasm between the scientific mind and the religious 
mind, when they are found together in the same indi- 
vidual. Some men can keep them from fighting, but 
for most men either they keep up the warfare, or else 
at last one or the other of them is cast out. 

It is hardly necessary to call attention to the dis- 
comfort, the wretchedness of such a state of affairs. 
The description Paul gives of the most important phase 
of this discord is more or less applicable to all phases. 
It has been said of some men, and rather truly, that 
they have just enough religion to make them miser- 
able. Religious natures, interrupted by all sorts of 
interference within the man's own life, remind one of 
great torrents of water in some river bed, foaming 
and screaming as they find themselves dammed up 
by obstructions that will not give away, until they 
rush forth into new and hitherto unused channels, 
which they make for themselves, while they spread 
destruction in their way. For many of the vagaries 
of the day are like these new channels rivers some- 
times make for themselves. This is simply to say 
where happiness cannot be found in one way, it will 
be found in another. The suffering soul is like the 
suffering body, open to all sorts of nostrums promis- 
ing relief. No sublimer picture has the world beheld 
than that of Jesus perfectly quiet in the midst of such 
conflicting thoughts and influences as came to him on 
the eve of his crucifixion, and telling his disciples that 

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he would leave peace with them, even his own peace. 
Within his own bosom the storms of the day and of 
all days had been hushed to a perfect calm. 

In the perfect fellowship with God which is present 
in sincere worship, we receive the happiness incident to 
the harmony of our souls. In worship the whole soul 
goes out after God, and there is no evidence of any 
disagreement or discord. The mind is alert, more 
so than is common, thinking the great thoughts the 
Holy Spirit gives, the feelings are on fire with love, 
the will stands on its feet with a new power to com- 
mand. We are not three men; we are one. It re- 
minds one of the harmony or unity that often comes 
into a group of men through the appeal of a common 
interest, a common difficulty, or a common joy. All 
that is in us was made for God, and we find an agree- 
ment in this, if nowhere else. So there comes the con- 
viction that agreeing here, the parts of our natures 
need not disagree anywhere else. It has been a some- 
what debated question as to where the emphasis should 
be placed in the life of the soul, as it comes into the 
presence of God. In sincere worship this question is 
not present. The best of the intellect, and the best of 
the emotions, and the best of the will are there. If 
we may speak of a science-faculty, and a faith-faculty, 
they too kneel together in adoration of the Lord God. 
While faith with a sublime immediacy knows that it 
has reached the Shechinah, the scientific soul finds 
here the completion of its investigations and discov- 
eries and the explanation of much that was before 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

inexplicable. It may well sing the words of the old 
revival hymn, 

"This is the way I long have sought 
And mourned because I found it not." 

The soul comes back under the touch of God to its 
normal self, its primal greatness. Each hour of wor- 
ship is a new creation. God made no discord, when 
he made man in his own image. The three Persons 
in the Godhead are not a Triad; they are a Trinity. 
From creation, through redemption, until now, there 
has been this central harmony, an eternal harmony. 
His children tnust be like him, and when they come 
back to the Father's house, they do have the music of 
the Godhead in their very beings. We are only chil- 
dren anyhow very like our Father, but needing to come 
to him quite often through imitation of him and in- 
struction from him, still further to develop this resem- 
blance. Sometimes we come to him with floods of 
tears streaming down our cheeks and wild cries in our 
hearts, and his very presence lulls us to rest. No ex- 
planation of the mysteries that have troubled us, no 
solution of vexatious problems, perhaps no word of 
comfort comes to us, perhaps we do not call to mind 
the words spoken aforetime to the saints in the Bible 
record and elsewhere. No, but his harmonious, peace- 
ful self, like the presence of Jesus in the storm on 
Galilee, quiets us by simply restoring us to ourselves. 
During the Napoleonic wars, while the cathedral at 
Antwerp was used for military purposes and war was 
raging without, the chimes in the cathedral tower still 
rang out the sweet harmonies of the church under the 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

skillful hands of the chimer. So the discord of the 
Wi rid is not necessarily our own, under God's touch 
there may always be music. 

It is not too much to add that the voice (not voices) 
of God in us brings the harmony. We get a strange 
notion, as we go about our daily work, that many 
voices, confusing and discordant voices, are speaking 
to us. They are only one voice — ^the voice of God, 
which is indeed as the sound of many waters, an organ 
of innumerable stops. At last we discover that the 
voice which speaks to us in the hour of holy com- 
munion is that we heard before, and that it is one, 
and as he speaks, our souls are all in tune with this 
infinite harmony. A strange hush came over the 
troubled soul of the poor mad Saul as David played 
on his harp. Often to us comes a strange quiet as we 
hear the h)mins of the church. Even so the voice of 
God, which is the source of all the music of all the 
ages in heaven and in earth, brings to us its own 
harmony. 

Whatever we may have been carrying about with 
us, out of harmony with God and so out of harmony 
with ourselves, and bringing into our lives the discord 
which has so disturbed us, must in our worship, depart. 
We find no place for it and it is quite easy to give it 
up. We desire to hear nothing in our souls but the 
echo of his own blessed words. The loves of life in 
a new ambition grow pure and the businesses of life 
become clean and honest. I remember a great cathe- 
dral choir of some two hundred voices accompanied 
by a good orchestra of many instruments, which I 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

occasionally heard in my boyhood. The choir had 
a remarkable director. Under his leadership and mas- 
tered by many well-trained leading voices, I have 
known men and women with voices somewhat harsh 
and unmusical, entering the choir, to have their voices 
swallowed in the sweet music as they added to the 
great volume of the song. So as God speaks in our 
souls, every discordant note is changed to sweetest 
music. We read "Mary Magdalene, out of whom he 
had cast seven devils.'* Beautiful indeed was her life 
now. Where God is, where God speaks, the shrieking, 
hissing demons cannot stay. 

In worship we see the world as a harmonious whole : 
here are order, music, beauty. On our busy days, we 
are like men who are so close to an orchestra, that 
they hear certain instruments to the exclusion of others, 
or they watch the movements of first this performer 
and then that, and miss the music altogether. Our 
experiences are fragmentary and partial. Life is frag- 
mentary and partial, made up of dull routine and 
monotonous. Worship brings to us that larger view 
of life in which routine and monotony are no more, 
where the partial and fragmentary things become parts 
of a perfect whole. We hear the great symphony the 
orchestra is playing, and forget that the individual per- 
formers and their instruments are there. The Bible 
everywhere urges us to view things in their complete- 
ness, and if as yet they are incomplete, to think of them 
not as they are, but as they are yet to be, and faith 
can see the completed whole as if it were already here. 
It is said the zoologist can, with a single bone of some 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

extinct animal before him, present an outline of the 
entire animal form. Faith needs only a small start 
to make it possible for it to see not only the visible 
things as one great whole, but also that vast invisible 
life of which it is but a little part. Yes, a vast vision 
of beauty, filled with harmonious sounds, spreads out 
before the believing worshiper's gaze and he can 
sing exultantly, 

"The promised land, from Pisgah's top, 
I now exult to see : 
My hope is full, O glorious hope! 
Of immortality." 

Most inspiring is Paul's conception of all things 
given us in his letter to the Colossians : *'For in him 
(Jesus Christ) were all things created, that are in 
heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, 
whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principal- 
ities or powers; all things were created through him 
and unto him (with him in view) ; and he is before all 
things, and in him all things hold together." What 
Paul saw, every saint in the act of worship sees, a 
Christ who is all in all, or if you prefer to say the 
same thing in a somewhat different way, a God who 
is all in all, but whom we see and understand in the 
face of Jesus Christ. But this is not the view of the 
worldly man. No, the earth is a sphere which finds its 
end in the exploitation of the capitalist, the toil of the 
laborer, the discoveries of the scholar, the ambitions of 
the conqueror. The very heavens seem to some men 
to have been made for the telescope of the astronomer, 
and the laboratory of the physicist. Even so the uni- 

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WHEN GOD AND ]VIAN MEET 

verse is not without its charm, not without its interest 
for every order of mind. But in it all much more is 
hidden than we ever see. There are great stretches 
of mysteries, annoying mysteries we do not expect 
ever to understand. There are things which hurt, 
things which to our unaided sight seem unwise, and 
at times even wrong. Disease and famine and pesti- 
lence come. Periods of prosperity are immediately 
followed by periods of depression. There may seem 
to us to be more of discord than of music. But in the 
sanctuary, in the closet, there comes Paul's vision of 
a universe which finds its meaning in Jesus Christ, in 
Jesus Christ crucified, which must ultimately obey his 
behest, which has not been unfolding merely in the 
past, but which is still unfolding in accord with his 
will, and must at last be a perfect expression of the 
will of God as revealed in his Son. Immediately all 
that is ugly and unattractive goes. The universe is 
but a great frame to enclose the glorious presence of 
Jesus Christ. We are seeing him everywhere. 

"Where'er I am, where'er I move, 
I meet the object of my love." 

The world becomes for us a splendid harmony, be- 
cause we see in our lives, when we gather for prayer 
and praise, or in the quiet of our private fellowship 
with God, how all the factors that enter into its varied 
activities have had a strange influence in shaping our 
characters and always for good, while we look at the 
things which are not seen and trust in our Lord. It is 
just the kind of world, with all its defects and im- 
perfections, writers of theodicies have said might be 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

a school or discipline for humanity. And so it is, if 
you think of God as in this world using it as tools for 
the shaping of character and destiny, and also of the 
men being shaped as gladly submissive to the divine 
purpose. The time does come, and it comes while he 
is dwelling in the secret place of the Most High, when 
the saint sees that this world has not only fed and 
clothed him and given him a shelter from the heat and 
the cold, but that, taken as a whole with a most beau- 
tifully harmonious purpose, it has had very much to 
do with making him the saint that he is. And to this 
blessed sainthood have contributed in the most har- 
monious way things apparently most contradictory, the 
world's hates and loves, poverty and riches, hunger 
and plenty, sickness and health, births and deaths, de- 
feats and triumphs. We cannot say that this is the 
worst possible world, but we see it to be a world made 
by the Father for his children, in his hands perfectly 
adapted to the purpose he had in view, a world by 
which the Father makes the children ready for a world 
which is perfect and eternal. With these things in our 
minds, the world grows very beautiful to us, even its 
graves and its battlefields are lovely. In our moments 
of ecstasy we not only look upward to the heavenly 
fields with rejoicing and glad anticipation, but we look 
over the fields of earth with happy memories and sin- 
cere thanksgiving. All along the road we have come 
we can see the Ebenezers we have raised, with joy we 
should have never known, had not this world given 
us the opportunity. 

And the sense of the world's harmony increases 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

with the thought, already in part presented, that its 
harmony is only a part of a yet larger harmony. The 
spectroscope has revealed to us that all worlds through- 
out the vast expanse are made of practically the same 
things, the materials being in different stages of de- 
velopment. The same physical forces hold them in 
their places and bring them on their journeys. No 
world has much right to boast of itself as over against 
another. May we not say then that, wherever and 
whatever heaven may be, this world has in it all the 
possibilities of that blessed place, that in all that is 
essential it resembles it, that the saints here have no 
reason to fear they may feel uncomfortable and un- 
happy even for a moment because of any awkwardness 
in that blessed estate. Tennyson, you will remember, 
speaks of this world as through prayer bound, as by 
gold chains, about the feet of God. In those best 
moments, when the child of God appears before the 
throne of grace, and meets his Father, these things 
seem true without any reasoning — he comes to them 
intuitively. The earth and heaven seem so near to- 
gether, they are as though they were, if not one, twin 
orbs for him. It does not seem unnatural that he 
should hold converse with angels, and he feels as 
though the loved ones who have gone from him are 
only in the next room. That God should have spoken 
to the prophets and humbler men in the past or should 
speak to him now, is not unreasonable or fanciful. 
Wherever God is or can be is one harmonious whole, 
and so he has a sublime certainty that without alarm 
he might go forth anywhere within the confines of 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

space. Death itself therefore can have no terror. The 
principle that guides and controls and fills all is love. 
And so the world ceases to be a vale of tears, and 
becomes a land of Immanuel, through which he 
marches to a yet fairer and more fertile land. He re- 
joices as he goes. 

When we come before God in worship, we discover 
that we are in harmony with the universe and the uni- 
verse is in harmony with us, and we are happy in the 
world just as it is. We are accustomed to hearing 
about the struggle for life, the battle with the terrific 
forces, when we find nature "red in tooth and claw.'* 
We see it not only in the life of nature, but in the 
economic and industrial world, in the conflict of nation 
with nation. We have ourselves been cast into some 
lion's den, driven out to measure swords with some 
gigantic foe. At times we come to the conclusion that 
the universe is against us, and we against the universe, 
that at least this is true of our part of the universe. 
Our only hope is in the escape from it all into a place 
called heaven, which we do not think of as in the uni- 
verse, not at any rate as we find it now. Nature looks 
to us like an enormous sphinx, or as one great philoso- 
pher has put it, like a great Will without intelligence 
and without heart, constantly running amuck. It is 
not possible for us to see design or what we call divine 
providences. It would all of it be quite interesting, 
if we did not have to put up with it and to live in it. 
It is like a cage of lions most entertaining, so long as 
the lions remain in the cage and we are on the outside. 
But in this instance we are in the cage. There is har- 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

mony enough in the world, but it is out of harmony 
with us. As for ourselves, we go into life with the 
conviction always with us that we are here to fight, 
fight everything. There is never a peaceful moment. 
We are taught to sing, 

"We should suspect some danger nigh, 
Where we possess delight." 

In §pite of ourselves, we become dualistic. We may 
place ourselves in the ranks of Ormuzd, but Ahriman is 
near with his cohorts, and for a while he will be master 
of the very things that come nearest to us and our 
interests. 

In the presence of our God, there comes a wonder- 
ful change. Much that we saw and heard was true, 
but now we see much more. In the midst of all the 
madness and wildness stands the cross. It is saying, 
"Here is the symbol of the force which shall ultimately 
control all things." It is this which brings harmony 
into the world, into humanity, and between humanity 
and the world. In this sign we conquer, not by the 
victory of warfare, but by the victory of reconciliation. 
There are laws above other laws, forces above other 
forces. What terrific power one faces in an electric 
power-house; there are dials registering, and there 
are warning signs on every hand. But you have not 
here read the whole story. Something else is happen- 
ing, for gentle hands are elsewhere turning on the light 
and heat in reduced measure, reduced to meet a human 
need. The redemption of man is power, the power 
of God, but it is his power unto salvation. Jesus said, 
"All power is given unto me in heaven and earth," 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

but in that moment he is sending his disciples out on 
ministries of mercy. It is this cross which so appears 
that we see nothing else. It reminds one of the vision 
of the writer of the Star-Spangled Banner, who knew 
as he looked out from the midst of the enemies of his 
country, that so long as he could see the flag waving 
all was well. In his epistle to the Colossians, Paul 
says, **And having made peace through the blood of 
his cross by him to reconcile all things unto himself; 
by him, I say, whether they be things in earth or things 
in heaven." 

In worship, we feel the forces of righteousness. We 
know they are stronger than the world, are the con- 
trolling factors. They speak in thunder tones in us 
through our consciences. They speak in thunder tones 
in nature. We see that as we ourselves suffer, if we 
disobey the moral law, so retribution comes to the very 
fields. We read the prophecies which threaten drought 
and pestilence and famine, and we see the meaning of 
them now. We believe that the stars did in their 
courses fight against Sisera, because Sisera was against 
the kingdom of God! In the house of prayer we not 
only behold the cross, and are thrilled by its message 
of grace; we are in the presence of Sinai as well, not 
afraid, but rejoicing in its precepts and believing in 
its triumph. This Sinai is in the world also, above 
all material things in its rule, and commanding at last 
all governments and rulers. In the house of prayer, 
we never doubt that the right shall conquer, though 
we may often have doubted elsewhere. But we see 
now a world not haphazard, not running as by chance, 

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WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

not in danger of a fall. It is an orderly world, accom- 
plishing the divine will, obedient to every principle of 
righteousness, and subservient to the welfare of man- 
kind. We see what John saw, when he was in the 
Spirit on the Lord's Day, "A new heaven and a new 
earth." It was there all the while, but we did not have 
eyes to see. We are now in harmony with the world, 
the world with us. Those highest things in us which 
drive out to duty, which protest against wrong and 
cruelty, which demand that the children of God shall 
be dealt with as children, are in the world also, while 
the things in the world we did not understand are ex- 
plained in the cries of our consciences and their longing 
for the victory of the right and the truth. 

We use in our worship materials from the world out- 
side and in the use of them gain access to God. Those 
are eloquent words in which the Old Testament prophet 
describes the splendid materials, brought in from many 
places, to make more beautiful and even more divine 
the temple of Jehovah. It does not occur to him that 
any of this material could be devilish or merely ma- 
terial. It will cease to be wood or gold or brass; it 
is now temple, house of God. We may know that 
such material may elsewhere serve ignoble purposes. 
It may be that the pews in the church were made by 
a corporation, which, along with other firms in com- 
petition for the contract, offered the preacher or the 
chairman of the building committee graft. Still we 
know that this is no necessary part of their presence 
there, and that they gain after a while a peculiar sanc- 
tity. Thus does the world become a part of that 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

which is highest in us, a part of our real selves. We 
begin to realize that we do not need to go to heaven 
to find in some real sense pearly gates and golden 
streets, and we are overwhelmed by all the meaning in- 
volved in the opening words of the book of Genesis, 
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth," the same God who afterwards commanded his 
people to build a temple and prescribed in minute detail 
the forms of worship. Our hearts are filled with glad- 
ness in knowing that we do not after all lead a ghostly 
life, a life out of the flesh, a life of unreality, when we 
spend much time in worship, that indeed we are then 
leading the most real life, because the material things 
which before were so impermanent and unsubstantial, 
now gain for themselves a measure of permanence, Hke 
the stone as it leaves the sculptor's hands having be- 
come "a thing of beauty," and therefore "a joy for- 
ever," 

There is an experience so rich that the world with- 
out becomes a spiritual world, and our bodies become 
spiritual bodies. It is a well-known fact that Bee- 
thoven wrote his greatest music after he became so 
deaf he could not hear a sound of the piano or violin. 
Mozart forgot his food as he worked out heavenly 
harmonies. The most genuine fasting has been of 
those who have forgotten their food in devotion to 
higher concerns, in their earnest endeavor to decide 
some great issue of life. It may well be said that 
the world is spiritual rather than material and that 
we are spirits and simply have bodies. Paul could 
say of some of his experiences, in spite of tortures 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

visited upon him, "whether in the body or out of the 
body, I cannot tell, God knoweth." And Shakespeare 
writes, 

"There's not the smallest which thou behold'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims; 
Such harmony is in immortal souls; 
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly clothe it in, we cannot hear it." 

But here is our trouble, the muddy vesture of decay 
still grossly clothes it in, and most of the time we are 
seeing the orbs both large and small, but do not hear 
the angel song, and while our hearts break with the 
desire to see and hear within the veil, we move in the 
midst of material things with our physical life assert- 
ing itself. This spell is broken, when we worship 
God". God himself is a Spirit, he wakes up our 
spirits. God the Spirit created all things and he shines 
through all the works of his hands. 

There is no greater misfortune than the injecting 
of things wholly material, or made wholly material, 
into the sacred hours of the church. Ritualism may 
go so far that forms and ceremonies, largely physical 
or material, obscure all else — worship is a matter of 
incense, stained glass windows, pictures and the like, 
to the utter forget fulness of any of the things here 
symbolized. The Sabbath morning may be taken up 
with social theories, with questions of bread and meat 
and clothes, with housing and play-grounds — all of 
value but in themselves material. Or the orphanage' 
or some other charity commands our attention, to be 
fixed upon what are for the moment almost entirely 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

physical needs. Or the financial side of the church is 
so presented that we are not only tempted to think of 
the church as wholly a business proposition, but for the 
whole hour our minds wander away from things spirit- 
ual. Of course there are churches where a tendency 
to foolish or excessive clothing leads to the same result. 
Now I do not forget how more or less all these things 
have their place in the house of God. Some ritual 
we must have, and all things must be done decently 
and in order. The church has to deal with every 
human need, it must be the Good Samaritan, and never 
either priest or Levite. It must sustain its own in- 
stitutions and pay its bills, if for no other reason as a 
matter of common honesty. And there is a benedic- 
tion in the desire to appear clean and neatly robed 
after the toil of the week. But the worship may be 
so conducted that a fine spirituality may permeate all 
these more material things, which may themselves be 
so presented and so considered as to be acts of worship. 
As King Saul was mastered by the ecstasy of the com- 
pany of the prophets, until he too prophesied, so the 
material and physical demands of the church may be 
so filled by the presence and power of the Spirit, that 
they may be as resplendent with his glory as the hymn 
or the prayer or the Holy Word. 

And the worship may become so carnal that the 
spiritual fades away. All is for display or vainglory. 
We wish the world to know how much we pay for our 
music, or that our soprano was once a famous opera 
star, that our pastor is paid the largest salary in the 
state, and is a man of rare scholarship and still rarer 

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WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

eloquence, that the auditorium is crowded at every 
service, and that we have a larger number of the rich 
and socially prominent than any other church. This 
may be another application of the Master's famous 
saying, "If therefore the light that is in thee be dark- 
ness, how great is that darkness." We may carry with 
us to the church great bundles of sensuous material, 
great masses of darkness to add to the darkness already 
there. Or we may carry with us the spiritual and 
great floods of light. I remember preaching for a 
week in a little unfinished country church. Each one 
took with him his own chair, and each group carried 
a lantern to light their way to the church, and to light 
the church after their arrival So the glory of the 
temple depends quite largely on the glory of the living 
stones. In some churches you feel the power of God 
as soon as you enter, you are never tempted to gaze 
about. In others the atmosphere of the hall, the 
theater, the social gathering takes hold upon you. Sad 
indeed is it for us when we hope to find all spiritual, 
and we find all material, even the altar of God. 

But after all what means it that all becomes suddenly 
spiritual as we worship God? He is in the church 
as in a body and fills it with his light and power. It is 
as when a man's soul gives thought and feeling to his 
face, and makes his hands and feet and poise reveal his 
character, so that you after a while know him as he 
walks away in the distance. You have seen the eternal 
Soul in all that makes the church a church ; you know he 
is in all the rest of his body, that no part has been paral- 
yzed and lost its connection. You have seen his face, you 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

will see that you have been looking at his feet and his 
hands and did not know it. You had before thought 
they were just feet and hands. If one were to go into 
Westminster Abbey, not knowing what to expect there, 
and suddenly should come upon the numerous tombs 
and monuments, not arranged in any remarkably 
orderly way, and looking altogether rather untidy and 
unclean, one might turn away without any awakening 
of interest. But go near and read the names of de- 
parted saints and heroes, Wesley, and Tennyson, and 
Livingstone, and all the rest. All at once they seem- 
to come forth from the dead. You are surrounded 
by a goodly company. You linger in such hallowed 
associations. All becomes strangely beautiful. So 
does the church become the dwelling-place of God, in- 
stinct with life and beauty, and so does the world 
around us. God is near at every turn. There is noth- 
ing ugly and unattractive now. Life is one constant 
song of rejoicing. 

There is an added joy — a wondrous joy — in the new 
thought of God revealed in Jesus Christ as our Father. 
There are many ways to think of God. We may look 
upon him as an unknown somewhat, an algebraic x or 
y. Life is one great mystery and there is no trail 
through it. Perhaps we go only a part of the way 
with Job, the darker part of the* way, when he exclaims, 
"Behold I go forward, but he is not there; and back- 
ward, but I cannot perceive him; on the left hand, 
where he doth work, but I cannot behold him; he 
hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see 
him." We are not quite sure that "he knoweth the 

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WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

way that I take," and that "when he hath tried me, 
I shall come forth as gold." We are confident there 
is something there, more than we can see, but we do 
not know whether that something is a person or a 
force or a law or a general resultant of the things we 
do see and know. At times the great Unknown does 
not in the least disturb us. We are indifferent; that 
is all. We are interested in the details of our daily- 
life. Sometimes as we look into the great haze that 
surrounds us, there appears to us some startling specter 
like the specter of Brocken, and it may be that here 
too we are looking at our own dark dreams, out of 
which we have made a kind of deity of our own. At 
times, we hear the storm raging, and know not what 
mischief is abroad, and we become strangely like 
people of the north of Europe, when in times of un- 
usual tempest, they revert to the beliefs of their heathen 
ancestors and ours, as they say, *'Odin is abroad to- 
night." 

Convinced of the personality of God, some are under 
the spell of the sterner side of his character, and are 
blind to his tenderness, love, and care. They see his 
infinite power and are afraid. They adopt the words 
of Jesus as their own, "Nevertheless not as I will, but 
as thou wilt," not with sweet trust in the Fatherly love 
and wisdom, but with a grim, stoical determination to 
submit to the inevitable. They do not complain, be- 
cause they are afraid to complain. They fear to love 
too much loved ones and friends, because they think 
they may be robbed of all such treasures. Others are 
cliarmed or terrified by his wisdom, skill, and in- 

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THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

genuity. It is not a wisdom which concerns them per- 
sonally, which works out a beautiful scheme for each 
child's life, but a wisdom plans great epochs in history, 
sets up one nation and puts down another, makes great 
worlds, creates and combines tremendous forces, or 
delicately fashions those secret things, the hidden glory 
of which the microscope only partially reveals. Mean- 
while, the constant fear arises lest, wandering as one 
must through these fields of wisdom, one may by unin- 
tentional blundering misuse the things which God has 
made, and scatter destruction around. It is written 
in the Bible and in the heavens and on the earth, **Be 
sure your sin will find you out,*' and this is about all 
some ever see of God. He is a detective ferreting out 
every, even the slightest, violation of his laws, delight- 
ing in the apprehension of the criminal and making 
helpless or destroying the workers of iniquity. 

It is only in Jesus Christ that we see God as he truly 
is, wise and strong, and righteous, but more, a God of 
love, our Father. This is the knowledge of him which 
comes to us, in our hours of worship. In my early 
school days, I had a teacher whom all the boys — myself 
among the rest — greatly feared. He was exacting in 
the length of the lessons and in the required prepara- 
tion of them, unreasonable in his punishment of the 
least misbehavior or disobedience of his orders — ^this 
was our estimate of him. One day he asked me to 
remain after class to my great affright, and surprised 
me by inviting me to have supper at his home the fol- 
lowing night. Of course, I went with some trepida- 
tion. Just after I arrived and was greeted by the 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

professor, his only son came in. They embraced each 
other and then for some moments romped and played 
with each other, like two school-boys. It was as 
though a veil had dropped from his character, and he 
appeared as he really was. After that whatever he did 
and said had a new interpretation. His apparently 
severe demands were only the requirements of a fa- 
therly friend, longing to make of every boy a clean, 
heroic man. Such a changed conception of God comes 
to the man who finds his presence in Christian worship. 
He sees him in a different place, and it is the place 
where he best reveals himself — the place where, speak- 
ing after the manner of men, he can be, and is, himself. 
He sees him now, not in the storm and earthquake, not 
in the laboratory and observatory, not in the retribu- 
tions which follow in the wake of lust and dishonesty, 
but in the cross of Jesus Christ. 

"This, this is the God we adore, 

Our faithful, unchangeable Friend, 
Whose love is as great as his power, 

And neither knows measure nor end: 
'Tis Jesus, the First and the Last, 

Whose mercy will guide us safe home. 
We'll praise Him for all that is past, 

And trust Him for all that's to come." 

But remember that in that cross all the attributes of 
God are found. 

"Here the whole Deity is known, 
Nor dares a creature guess 
Which of the glories brighter shone. 
The justice or the grace." 

An indescribable joy comes into the soul with the 
consciousness that this great God, omnipotent, all-wise, 

[228] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

just, holy, is our God, full of love, and that "like as 
a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them 
that fear him." You may think of that other precious 
revelation of God which Isaiah gives us, "As one whom 
his mother comforteth so will I comfort you." What 
before was terrible, now adds to the value of the 
fatherhood and motherhood of God. The terrible 
things are our defense. They quiet us. They ward 
off our enemies. The roar of the lioness strikes terror 
in the heart of the hunter, but it is music to her cubs. 
We feel a peculiar strength. The cross is the center 
of divine power. Love masters all the resources at 
its command. Fatherhood is the assurance of all the 
fullness of God. Some years ago in one of our South- 
ern states, after long continual rains, many of the 
rivers and creeks were out of their banks. A woman, 
living near the bank of one of the rivers in a little 
cottage, noticed the stream was rising rapidly, and 
decided to cross the railroad trestle and go to the 
home of a friend, which stood on much higher ground. 
She had lived there so long she knew the schedule of 
all the trains, but she had forgotten that just at that 
time they were all out of schedule. When she was half 
way across, she heard the whistle of the engine just 
around the curve. It was too late for the engineer to 
stop. But she had her infant in her arms. Like a 
flash, she dropped between the great timbers of the 
trestle, holding on by one hand until she was rescued. 
The mother love made possible this wonderful feat; 
this made her strong and quick to think. But for the 
babe she might have failed. 

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WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

There is joy in the fellowship with God. No life is 
complete in itself. We are truly human only in so 
far as we are parts of society. So there is no keener 
suffering than that which accompanies loneliness. This 
crowded world too often leaves us to ourselves. Not 
long ago the New York Tribune had these lines : 

"I thought the house across the way 
Was empty, but since yesterday 
Crepe on the door makes me aware, 
That some one has been Hving there !" 

We have here but one of many illustrations of how 
the selfish demands of life interfere with the most 
human, and therefore the most divine things of life. 
The larger part of the fellowship we find is in club- 
rooms and afternoon teas. 

When we walk along the streets or in other ways 
come in contact with other human beings, we touch 
each other in the things distinctly non-essential, and 
rarely does the secret place of one find an answer from 
the secret place of another soul. Just as we may feed 
on so-called foods, and yet for lack of nourishment in 
them slowly die of starvation, so we may have asso- 
ciations with multitudes of people in a great city while 
the longing for companionship is never satisfied. We 
come together as grocers or bankers or members of 
the same political party, or sect, as those who live on 
the same street, but not as men and women with infinite 
yearnings, with a divine restlessness, the children of 
God. It sometimes happens that even those so near 
to us in our homes are far away from us, and the lone- 
liness in such cases hurts the more, because we are 

[230] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

constantly expecting what we do not find, only to be 
more and more bitterly disappointed. 

Quite probably it is our own fault that we are lonely 
in the crowd. It is we who are uncompanionable. 
We do not know how to open our hearts, to break down 
the prison doors of mere propriety. We are in need 
of some one — and there are such in the world — to open 
our own souls to ourselves as well as to others, for 
companionship is a mutual thing. It may be we have 
an unfortunate temperament, or possibly great sorrows 
or great questionings have buried themselves in our 
hearts, and we fear others will not appreciate them, do 
not care to be disturbed by them. Or the most sacred 
companionship of life has been broken, and unfortu- 
nately we cannot see beyond the grave; and no other 
voice can bring cheer. One of the most pathetic things 
ever written is the account of his wife's death given 
by Moncure D. Conway in his autobiography closing 
with these words, "But I write no more; that way 
darkness lies.'' 

We never grow weary with thinking of such com- 
panionship as that of Damon and Pythias, of David 
and Jonathan, of Paul and Timothy, of Jesus and 
John, whom Jesus loved. iHere are subjects for 
orators and poets and artists and dramatists. Some of 
these friendships were wholly unexpected, where tastes 
seemed to differ, where ambitions seemed to cross, 
where education was according to antagonistic con- 
ceptions, or where the social status was very far apart. 
Blessed are they who no matter of whom born, nor 
where born, nor in what conditions, can say with the 

[231] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

Latin dramatist, ''I am a man and I consider nothing 
that is human foreign to myself," or with a much 
greater, the apostle to the Gentiles, ''where there is 
neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircum- 
cision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." For here 
is the secret of companionship, to find that human 
element, each in the other, which has nothing to do 
with wealth or poverty or nationality or color of skin, 
or even culture. It is interesting how often men, 
hardly acquainted with each other, have formed last- 
ing friendships in summer camps, in army tents, or on 
long journeys. Such friendships are among the very 
richest blessings of life. 

But companionship at its best looks to an ideal found 
only in the friendship of God, the friendship of Jesus 
Christ, a companionship, a friendship which finds its 
deepest realization in the ecstatic hours of worship. 
The search for a companion, for a friend, is a search 
for God, and we are likely to find him in his house. 
If there is joy in finding an earthly friend with whom 
we can walk in closest fellowship, how much higher is 
the rapture of the ideal companionship. I remember 
a home I used now and then to visit, where all the 
environment was as humble as it could well be, al- 
though everything was spotless, where an aged hus- 
band and wife had lived together for more than half 
a century in closest, sweetest fellowship. It was a joy 
just to sit there and look at them together, even 
when no word of affection passed between them. For 
us there is an unspeakable joy in simply being with 
God, with Jesus Christ, in some place of worship, how- 

[232] 



THE JOYS OF WORSHIP 

ever humble. A minister of our church tells how just 
a few nights before his little seven-year-old daughter 
sickened and died, she stole into his study, when he 
was very busy, and as she sat on the floor and looked 
up into his face she said, "I won't disturb you. I just 
want to be with you a little while." Paul can do no 
higher thinking of heaven than when he speaks of hav- 
ing a "desire to depart and be with Christ," or of being 
"absent from the body" and "present with the Lord," 
or "forever with the Lord." If this is the heavenly 
life, what greater bliss can earth afford? Perhaps no 
more bitter cry of anguish was ever heard than that 
which came from the lips of a brilliant skeptic in the 
darkest hour of his unbelief, "The Great Companion 
is dead." No greater grief could come to any of us 
than to have pass out of our lives forever the only 
perfect companionship. On the other hand, what 
gladness, what surpassing joy if, as the years go by 
and our own lives develop and enlarge themselves, we 
mean more to God and God means more to us, and so 
the companionship, always blessed, grows richer and 
sweeter. 

Thus in very many ways does worship bring its joys. 
We should be able always to say, "I was glad when they 
said unto me, *Let us go into the house of the Lord.' " 
A distinguished minister tells how once while he stood 
on the hill at Edinburgh and looked out on that won- 
derful scene which surrounds the great city, a cobbler 
climbed the hill, and, as he lighted his short-stemmed 
pipe, said, "I live down there among people who swear 
and use obscene language all day, and I find it needful 

[233] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

now and then to climb this hill and look out at that 
scene, and know that I am not altogether material/' 
Such a place for the soul is Mt. Zion, whence we have 
the vision of heaven and the face of God. 

"I ask no higher state : 
Indulge me but in this, 
And soon or later then translate 
To my eternal bliss." 



T234T 



Lecture VI 

THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE IN THE 
HOURS OF WORSHIP 



Lecture VI 

THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE IN THE HOURS 
OF WORSHIP 

IN the best of these hours of worship and communion 
with God come visions of the divine program, 
larger insight into the truth, and calls to special tasks. 
Such experiences probably come to all who talk with 
God face to face. Examples are quite numerous in 
the Bible times. Here is Moses tending the flocks of 
his father-in-law, Jethro, out under the blue Eastern 
sky by day and the bright stars by night, no doubt, 
like most men of those ancient days, worshiping the 
God of his fathers. He has the vision of the burning- 
bush, hears the voice which reveals to him the true 
character of Jehovah, and receives his appointment as 
the guide and deliverer of his people. On the mount, 
in an hour of ecstasy, he receives the law, the moral 
precepts which still are the basis of all right conduct. 
The psalmist is greatly perplexed because the wicked 
flourish and the righteous at the same time are trou- 
bled. He is almost ready to give up God and his 
service, but a new outlook comes to him when he enters 
the temple for sacrifice and worship. "Then saw I 
their end,'' he tells us. A new meaning comes into life, 
and he is ready now for his place in the kingdom of 
God. Samuel, left in the temple by his mother for any 



WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

training or work assigned him by Eli, the priest, but 
enjoying above all the privilege of being constantly in 
the house of the Lord, in the blessedness of continuous 
worship, hears the voice of Jehovah which brings in a 
new era in the history of the Jews, and puts him in a 
place of high honor and responsibility. Wondrous 
hour was that when he said, ''Speak, Lord, for thy 
servant heareth." Amos, the herdsman, who lived in 
the open like Moses in the days of his call, seeing such 
visions by day and night as came out of the silence into 
his loneliness, claiming to be neither a full-fledged 
prophet, nor yet a prophet's son, getting ready for a 
place among the officially recognized prophets, yields to 
the divine summons and brings to the people of his 
day, both high and low, such denunciation for sin and 
such offers of mercy as have been appropriately re- 
peated by preachers of righteousness in every age since. 
First Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, and 
made, in a moment of worship, extraordinary confes- 
sion for his sins and the sins of the people, receiving 
forgiveness and perfect cleansing, and then he heard 
the voice which asked, ''Whom shall I send? And 
who will go for us ?" He went out from that presence 
to be the greatest of all the ancient prophets. 

We find the same truth prominent in the New Testa- 
ment. Luke tells us that, after a season of prayer on 
the mountain-top, Jesus called to him the twelve and 
sent them forth. He had told them, according to the 
Acts of the Apostles, that they were to be witnesses 
to him in Jerusalem, all Judea, Samaria, and to the 
uttermost parts of the earth, but they were to hear 

[238] 



THE CALL TO SPECML SERVICE 

the real call to their supreme task, when day by day 
they remained together in worship and prayer. The 
old call becomes a new call now. While the young 
church in Antioch was in prayer, the Holy Ghost gave 
direction that Paul and Barnabas were to be separated 
to a special work, and these two heroes of the kingdom 
of God became foreign missionaries. The church was 
not particularly strong as yet, but they sent the best 
they had. This in all probability they could not have 
brought themselves to do, but for the inspiration and 
warmth of a great hour of worship. Paul reminds 
Timothy that the faith he had dwelt first in his mother 
and grandmother, and that from a child he had known 
the Holy Scriptures. His home had all the while been 
a place of prayer, and unquestionably it was out of 
such seasons of prayer as he daily enjoyed he received 
the call to labor with Paul. The great apostle was a 
devout man, had punctiliously observed all the require- 
ments of the law, was faithful in attendance on the 
worship of the temple and synagogue. He was on 
the way to perform what was then to him a religious 
duty, and had before caught the vision attendant upon 
the death of Stephen. It was natural that he should 
recognize a divine summons in that voice that broke 
through the heavens, as he fell to the earth. His first 
question was, "Who art thou, Lord?" On the house- 
top in prayer, Peter had the vision which made him 
know the kingdom of God was for Gentile as well as 
Jew and was quickly followed by the call to take the 
gospel to the Gentile centurion, Cornelius. John was 
in the Spirit, on the Lord's Day, when he had unfolded 

[239] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

to him that marvelous apocalypse or revelation which 
gave to him a new place in the kingdom of God, and 
appointed him a messenger to the church in all ages. 

Ever since the apostolic days, numerous have been 
the examples in the long list of distinguished saints and 
prophets, bringing to us the same lessons we have 
learned from the Old and New Testament Scriptures. 
In the various reforms and forward movements of the 
church, the leaders have come out of the church itself, 
though often corrupt, from among devout men rever- 
ently engaging in all the services of the house of prayer. 
It will be sufficient to name just three illustrious and 
very familiar names, Martin Luther, a devoted monk 
faithful to his every religious duty, and seeking con- 
stantly by every means rest for his soul, and who in 
Wartburg castle, alone with God and the Bible, largely 
worked out the great German reformation; John Wes- 
ley omitting no requirement of worship and making 
for himself extra seasons of prayer, commissioned in 
a moment of conscious communion with God to do a 
special work for the English-speaking people; General 
Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, going out 
after neglected masses, but who had been a devout 
Methodist and in that church for years had found 
God and his Son Jesus Christ. The men called to the 
ministry almost without exception come out of homes 
where the parents are devout and where the family 
are gathered each day for prayer and praise. In one 
Christian home, the head of which was well known 
throughout the South, every son has received a spe- 
cial call to a great task, and even two negro butlers, 

[240] 



THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

employed from time to time, have entered the ministry, 
after very careful preparation for that service. In 
nearly all genuine revivals God finds deaconesses and 
missionaries and preachers. At Student Volunteer 
Conventions, in seasons of consecration and prayer, 
without outward constraint, men and women, moved 
by the Spirit speaking to them within, deliberately sign 
their names to the well-known pledge. If we might 
call the roll of the leaders of the church, we should hear 
in the responses voice after voice declaring that, in 
some hour of sincere heartfelt worship, they gave them^ 
selves to the work of the church. 

It would seem, the gospel being what it is, that every 
worshiper should in the place and hour of prayer 
receive either a call to a new field or a fresh call with 
a new consecration to an old field. So much of our 
worship is so selfish, for our personal delectation for 
the present time, and our salvation in the eternal future 
that we are shutting out all possibility of hearing God's 
call to serve the world. We have reversed in such 
cases the Master's words about himself, and say in- 
stead, '*I came not to minister, but to be ministered 
unto," and it takes all the resources of heaven to per- 
form such ministration. Worship is so frequently 
wholly formal, in other words it is not worship at all. 
There is the employment of forms, of prayers, of 
hymns, created by men who walked with God in sea- 
sons when God was very near, but they are not now 
accompanied in their use by similar experiences. The 
worship may be sectarian or sectional. In it there is 
no place for the thought of humanity in the broadest 

[241] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

sense, humanity with all its innumerable needs. The 
thought is of one's denomination, state, nation, family. 
The call comes to men for whom as for Paul there is 
''neither Jew, nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond, 
nor free," and who are ready with the Good Samari- 
tan to minister to the nameless sufferer, just because 
he is a man and a sufferer. 

More than interesting is it, that in the secular life 
the men who seem, as if by accident, to run into some 
great discovery or to find some peculiarly attractive 
and suitable field of labor, have nearly always been 
faithfully discharging their regular duties. The won- 
derful development in cotton mill machinery is to be 
credited almost wholly to those who have toiled in the 
mills, earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. 
The discoveries in chemistry and astronomy are made 
by those who are about their business, often going 
about their ordinary tasks in spite of great weariness. 
The discoverers live among the stars and in the midst 
of retorts and test-tubes. The greatest musical, artis- 
tic, poetic compositions have come from those whose 
lives were given over to the very humdrum and mo- 
notony of the commonplaces of their calling. The 
patent office is full of ingenious contrivances that have 
not worked, the inventions of men of real genius. The 
plodders, often unnoticed by the world, just because 
they faithfully do their work, find their orbits, at times 
passing through fields of shining meteors, and surprise 
the world and themselves. The pinnacles of real last- 
ing fame are occupied by men who neglected no task, 

[242] 



THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

and were always found in the path of duty however 
rough. 

*'The heights by great men reached and kept 
Were not attained by sudden flight, 
But they, while their companions slept, 
Were struggling upward through the night." 

When we come to ask ourselves why these things 
should be true, the answer is not difficult. The opera- 
tions of God are conducted according to law and order. 
Within the compass of this law, God's plans and pur- 
poses are found. Here, too, what we call miracles 
have been performed, for nowhere can God deny him- 
self. Here, too, must we conduct our lives, find our 
work, make our discoveries. It is very necessary to 
know these laws, these purposes, and to adjust our- 
selves to them. The more thorough this adjustment, 
or better, obedience, may be, the larger the probability 
of a life of success or even of real greatness. The 
correct attitude, whether we face God in nature or 
grace, is that of Paul in the supreme crisis of his life, 
when he asked with full surrender, and abandon, 
"What wilt thou have me to do?" Two mistakes are 
made. On the one hand are those who are dreaming 
of success by some kind of chance, or by a providence 
which, properly interpreted, is no better than chance. 
Does not only the world, but the universe, the eternal 
order of things, yes, God himself, owe them a Hving, 
or a place, and will it not all come to them in due time ? 
And so they go on fully expecting that something will 
turn up, and they will not always be unknown men. 
On the other hand, are those who seek to break loose 

[243] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

from what they think to be the narrowness and restric- 
tion of the divine order, and to do something extraordi- 
nary, or to seek some unusual employment. The biog- 
raphies of the great men in every line of endeavor 
bring the distinct surprise, that so few unusual things 
made up their lives and they trod for the most part the 
common paths. Not only of Jesus but of all other 
great men, we are prone to say, "Is not this the car- 
penter? Do we not know his family? Can any good 
come out of Nazareth?" 

In the beaten path of the regular religious life, the 
great discoveries are made, as they are made in the 
secular life. Many things have been missed because 
of absence from the prayer-meeting on Wednesday or 
the worship of the Lord's Day, or because the daily 
study of the Bible was neglected, or the morning and 
evening prayer was hastily or thoughtlessly said. 
Sometimes the sermon seems dull ; perhaps the pastor 
preaches it, and he is never quite interesting. Or the 
prayers at the prayer-meeting are worded always in 
the same terms, and quite poorly worded at that. Or 
the singing is in every way faulty and the hymns are 
unwisely selected. We think it may be just as well to 
stay away from all this. Not so, for in those places 
God is operating, God is speaking. This is his orderly 
way of doing things. This is his church, against 
which the gates of hell cannot, will not prevail. We 
wish at times that we might have been with the disciples 
in the early days of the church, but the things they 
did in those days were the same as those very experi- 
ences which we now so often find monotonous. They 

[244] 



THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

had their prayer-meetings, their breaking of bread, 
their sermons, their church meetings for the considera- 
tion of things concerning the general welfare. 
Through these the Spirit made known the truth, re- 
vealed God's will, called men to special fields of labor. 
Just as when the two disciples were walking toward 
Emmaus, talking over the recent incidents which trou- 
bled them so much, Jesus drew near and walked with 
them, so as we tread the beaten path to-day, he comes 
to us again, and when we least expect it, he speaks to 
us of his cross, his resurrection, the coming glory. 

Everywhere are those who expect to find God and 
receive his special message only under circumstances 
more or less unusual. Every pastor has known many 
of his flock to be present at all the services of the 
revival, indeed to make the rounds of the churches 
where revivals are being held at the usual season, but 
to be absent from the regular services of the church, 
or at least to attend them quite irregularly. They are 
more than enthusiastic about some great evangelistic 
campaign. At all these times they are expecting some- 
thing unusual to happen, something which they do not 
expect at other times. Disappointments are not un- 
common. There are experiences, sorrows, losses, be- 
reavements, joys which do make possible our learning 
what otherwise we should not know, not so much 
because God comes to us in any new, unusual sense, 
but because we are ready for his voice. We all know 
how there are times, when the old church, with no 
marks of beauty on it before, suddenly has a strange 
charm about it, the preacher tiresome before seems 

[245] 



WHEN GOD AND IMAN MEET 

eloquent, the music uplifting, and God's voice so clear 
and distinct that we are sure he speaks even to us. 
The seed is the same: the soil is different. We came 
before with no sense of need, in the grip of earthly 
concerns, minds wandering over all the paths of the 
sky and the world. We come now, hungering and 
thirsting, the glory of all things earthly having van- 
ished from our gaze, and with nothing remaining to 
us but Jesus Christ and him crucified. The thorn in 
the flesh made way for God into the life of Paul, but 
God was not different. We have a right to expect 
God on all occasions, and according to our faith, our- 
selves, will be his message. Even Jesus, the Son of 
God, insisted, during the unfolding of his life and the 
development of his great scheme of redemption, that 
he must fulfill all righteousness. He went the way of 
all the servants of God and found his Father at every 
step. 

The history of the church has seen not a few who 
hoped, by some peculiar religious genius to invent 
something that would supply God and his message to 
man. Like the patent office, the religious world is 
full of inventions which have never worked, though 
some are never weary of experimenting with them. 
This is the explanation of theosophy. Christian Science, 
Spiritualism, Babism, and many other movements 
created and followed by those who had not found God 
in ordinary ways along ordinary paths, and they end 
in pantheism or practical atheism. How different was 
it with Luther, who when he became a leader of God's 
people in an hour of darkness, took men by the way 

[246] 



THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

of the ancient well-trodden path of justification by 
faith, as also with John Wesley, who directed the 
Methodist host into the path of the witness of the 
Spirit, through which for centuries God's people had 
marched towards heaven. And by both God was ex- 
alted. Certain is it that if we do not find God by 
normal processes, we shall not find him by the abnor- 
mal. If ever we do find him by other than normal 
processes, it will be in spite of our methods, out of 
his great love for us and mercy towards our weak- 
nesses. Our place always is to travel in the way our 
fathers trod and we shall find God as they did. 

"Our eyes see dimly, till by faith anointed, 

And our blind choosing brings us grief and pain; 
Through Him alone who hath our way appointed 
We find our peace again." 

In such an hour we have a vision of God, ourselves, 
the world, its needs and possibilities. We see God not 
as an Eastern potentate demanding praise and flattery, 
sitting idle on his throne, a God who has done some- 
thing in the past, but ceased from all his labors, the 
God of Deism, the Allah of Mohammedanism. He 
becomes to us the most active, the most self-sacrificing 
of beings, the slave of all, best seen in the Christ 
girded with the towel, washing the feet of his disciples. 
It is utterly absurd for any one to worship such a 
God who does not at the same time feel in himself 
the moving towards Christian activity, towards Chris- 
tian service. Indeed we cannot worship God at all 
unless we have a correspondence in ourselves with him. 
There is a great tendency to think that we must pre- 

[247] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN IMEET 

serve the dignity and greatness of God. Anything 
else may be sacrificed but this. A great deal of old- 
time theology, much of it quite valuable, started here. 
It is somewhat the attitude of the disciples trying to 
keep the mothers and children away from their great 
Master, or again when they seem to feel humiliated 
both for the Master and themselves that a heathen 
Syrophenician woman should be crying after them. 
The hymns of the church present to us a God no more 
afraid to be touched by the hands of sinful, but peni- 
tent men and women than Jesus w^as, a God who is 
ever stooping to the humblest needs of humblest men, 
a God who cannot keep still while his children suffer. 
We sing: 

"O Holy Father, who hast led Thy children 
In all the ages, with the fire and cloud, 
Through seas dry-shod, through weary wastes bewildering 
To Thee, in reverent love, our hearts are bowed. 

O Holy Ghost, the Lord and the Life-giver, 

Thine is the quickened power that gives increase, 

From Thee have flowed, as from a pleasant river, 
Our plenty, wealth, prosperity and peace." 

Such words as these were written for worship and in 
the spirit of worship. They were conceived, no doubt, 
in a time of worship. So shall we think of God when 
we come to pray, to commune with him, else why 
come? 

His universe must be like himself. There is a rea- 
son for the interdependence of all things, of star and 
star, man and beast, plant and animal, mind and mat- 
ter, man and God. It is a universe, a oneness, so real 

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THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

that some men look at it and see nothing but matter, 
while others look at it and see nothing but spirit ; and 
so we have two schools of philosophers, materialists 
and idealists. Neither o£ these schools is right, but 
both bear testimony to the conviction that there is a 
real unity. And this is all in perfect accord with the 
new vision of God. As the words father and mother 
are- keynotes and are decisive of the houses in which 
we live, and make them different from the other piles 
of brick and stone which we call mills and stores, so 
the better thoughts of God transform all around us, 
and we are in a new world of service, mutual service 
and love. It is a world far different from a world of 
evolution with its over-emphasis on the struggle for 
life, a world in which what Drummond called the 
struggle for the life of others is everywhere in evi- 
dence, because God is in all things, the God who lives 
for others. This world we see in our hours of wor- 
ship, just as we see the God of love, of active service. 
How natural is it for us now, if dominated by selfish- 
ness, even religious selfishness, to feel perfectly un- 
comfortable, not at home. Indeed it is not surprising 
that everywhere men devoted to selfish ends of money- 
making and pleasure should seldom be happy. There 
is a side to this world, that which makes it what it is, 
which often wholly unconsciously to themselves takes 
hold upon them. Vast fortunes accumulated at the 
expense of human, good, in the hands of men in no 
sense Christians, find their way out to ministrations 
of love and mercy for children, the aged, the sneering. 
We see the world, too, far away from the divine 
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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

idea and ideal, which Gk)d saw in the very beginning, 
when looking out upon all he had created he saw it to 
be very good. We see the heart-breaking needs of 
men. We are like a tender-hearted man, who, sitting 
in a warm, palatial home at a luxurious meal, should 
suddenly turn and see the faces of hungry, cold chil- 
dren at the window. Our own blessedness makes the 
sin and misery of the world appear the blacker. On a 
day during Christmas week in a great city with ice 
and snow in the streets, two bare-footed, pale-faced 
children stood over the grating in the sidewalk of a 
great toy-store keeping themselves warm with the heat 
from the basement below, and looking longingly at the 
wonderful exhibition in the windows. A beautifully 
gowned woman rode up in her Packard limousine. 
She was about to enter the store — would she pass the 
children by? No, she returned, led the children into 
the store, loaded them down with toys, helped them 
into her limousine, and for the moment, forgetting her 
own little ones, drove them to their home to meet 
the needs there also. There is the church, with its 
blessed gospel, its beautiful music, its throngs of God's 
children, the angels hovering near, Jesus with hands 
held out to bless, and all around are the miserable, the 
wretched, the blind, the naked. The blessedness of the 
hour with God brings to us also a sense of oppression, 
which leads us almost to demand of God that he let 
us help. 

And withal we have a vision of the possibilities of 
this world, unsatisfactory as it is just now. On the 
isle of Patmos, John saw at the climax of his great 

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THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

vision the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven 
and the tabernacle of God among men. Never did 
man look upon such terror and wretchedness as John 
had beheld on the earth, but even in such a world 
God could live and make it as the New Jerusalem. A 
similar scene comes up before us, whenever Hke John 
we are in the Spirit on the Lord's Day. What our 
hearts feel within themselves, in spite of all our sins 
and infirmities, convinces us that out of other clay 
like us he can make vessels to honor, that out of stone 
like us he can make other redeemed forms. The only 
difference between that marble just hauled into the 
studio of a Phidias and the marble down in the quarry 
still — but what a difference — is that the marble in the 
studio has a chance, and has already had fall on it 
the shadow of the great artist. Indeed Jesus himself 
is the ultimate possibility of every human being, and 
when we see him as we do in every sincere act of wor- 
ship, our hearts bound with joy in the certainty that 
we too may be good, and that every other man may 
be good too. The great preachers have always so as- 
sured the sinful and erring. Jesus himself said to the 
fallen, "Go and sin no more." 

We see ourselves, ourselves idealized, what under- 
neath all that is sinful, defective, transient, our real 
self is. Like men who hunting for some great fresco 
and at last, cleaning away whitewash and dirt, expose 
the great picture to view, we by processes, not so slow, 
but at times instantaneous, open up to our own gaze 
all that is essential to our humanity — and this comes to 
pass in seasons of prayer and divine fellowship. There 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

appear those things which make us human, things 
essential to our personality, but most important is that 
without which we cannot and afterwards do not claim 
to be men, our love for all the race, the impelling of 
all we have and are to service. Yes, hidden away in 
the depths of our souls is the cross. To serve is as 
needful to us now as to eat or to sleep. We say with 
Jesus, *'My meat is to do the will of my Father and to 
finish his work." 

We find a divine plan or program or purpose, and 
are convinced it can be consummated. We are in a 
position to understand what it all means, this church, 
these sacred hours, this worship. Worship at its best 
will not be merely a season of personal gratification, 
enjoyment, self-gratulation. The purpose ahead of all 
religious life is now known to be the giving of God 
the Father to the world, the opening of the way for 
his entrance into all life, everywhere, the building of 
the kingdom in men and among men. We are almost 
overwhelmed with the discovery that the church misses 
the whole meaning of its existence, yes its very right 
to exist at all, when it overlooks or forgets these things. 
Either to forget them or to overlook them is quite pos- 
sible, for we may be regularly at church and loyal to 
it as an organization without any sort of worship. 
We sing great hymns and hear great sermons and con- 
tribute all that is required, but God is absent from it 
all, and the things we do are ends in themselves, satis- 
factory if only they are done well. There is no end 
beyond this for the church at large. A few unusual 
men may have special calls to a large task, to the city 

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THE CALL TO SPECLVL SERVICE 

slums, to the sick room, to the people in non-Christian 
lands. But how can any one kneel in sincere adoration 
before the cross, whether present in actual symbol or 
not, without having its truth burn its way into his 
very life as the interpretation of all that goes on in any 
sort of relation to that temple where he kneels ? You 
know the story of the painter who went to church to 
see certain types of women for his somewhat sensuous 
brush, and was moved, as he looked upon the various 
emblems of the sacrifice of Jesus, to give his brush to 
spread abroad the story of this great love. 

The chief reason for the weakness of the church 
to-day is its frequent disloyalty to the very reason for 
its existence. No institution can very long prosper that 
does not remain true to its fundamental principles — a 
nation calling itself a republic when it is not a republic, 
boasting of liberty when it has no true Hberty, boast- 
ing of its homes, when divorces are ground out by the 
hundreds every court day; an education which claims 
for itself the training of the whole man, but fails to 
recognize the demands of the spiritual nature. These 
are but illustrations of a universal truth, that the pre- 
requisite to the success of any worthy movement or 
organization is faithful and persistent adherence to all 
that made the movement or the organization necessary. 
Abraham Lincoln, speaking of slavery in our country, 
said that no people could remain half slave and half 
free, words the truth of which we have all come to 
admit. How fully and even carefuly we follow in the 
wake of this great principle in material things! De- 
struction is in the violation of any law or purpose in the 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

physical world. The whole of progress consists in 
finding out the law and in slavish obedience to it when 
found out. What would have become of Jesus himself, 
if he had at any moment forgotten his own announce- 
ment of the purpose of his coming, "The Son of man 
came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and 
to give his life a ransom for many," even though he 
might have retained all other qualifications and all 
other ambitions and remained a great miracle worker, a 
great preacher, with marked power of leadership? He 
would have been enrolled with men like Epictetus and 
Plato and other teachers, but the foundations of his 
kingdom would have crumbled before he had begun 
the superstructure. 

The forces in religion which ought to be inspiringly 
helpful when used in accord with the divine plan, be- 
come distinctly hurtful when not so used. How unat- 
tractive, ever repulsive, is an intensely religious life 
when it is no more than this. The Master has given 
us in his picture of the Pharisee and the publican a 
striking glimpse at one type of such a character. There 
stands the Pharisee, perfectly satisfied with himself 
because he performs with exactness certain rounds of 
religious duty, willing not to develop his manhood any 
further, contemptuous towards the poor publican whom 
he is glad to see just because it gives God and others 
a chance to know by contrast how splendid a person- 
ality he is. Jesus has held up before our gaze another 
illustration in the elder brother of the Prodigal Son, 
who, just because he has violated no law of decency and 
has remained near to the place of safety in the father's 

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THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

house, is unwilling to recognize the tie of brotherhood, 
and sneeringly calls the returning wanderer, "This, 
thy son." The things that were good in this elder 
son's life have hardened his heart, destroyed his love 
and tenderness, and make us almost wish he had gone 
away with that younger man, if only like him he had 
come back sorrowful for the things he had done. We 
have another example in the priest and Levite of the 
parable of the Good Samaritan. Here a man belong- 
ing to a heterodox group can see the sufferings and 
hear the groans of the wounded man while those most 
intimately connected with the best religious life of their 
day could not, and could not simply because they were 
religious, intensely religious and no more. With them 
sacrifice was more than mercy. There is here no de- 
fense of irreligion and heterodoxy, but there is a 
condemnation of mere religion and mere orthodoxy. 
We are quite familiar in our modern days with the 
refusal of the church to lend its aid to needful social 
movements, just because it has so much religion to 
attend to. Let us stay near to our altars, in these 
sacred undefiled places, and not turn aside to the cries 
of the women and children in the factories and the 
men in the mines, the political corruption which pro- 
tects dens of iniquity which seize upon our young men 
almost as soon as they confess faith in Christ. 

This hour of true worship is an hour of joy, but it is 
a joy in the thought of making ready for the real 
purpose of our existence. Here is the preparation and 
we are eager for the service. Like our Lord, we have 
a baptism to be baptized with, and are straitened until 

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WHEN GOD AND IVIAN MEET 

it be accomplished. We are reminded of what the 
seventh earl of Shaftsbury, that man who out of his 
wealth and social prestige had done so much for the 
down-trodden poor of England, said when told he 
would soon be in heaven, "How can I go to heaven, 
while so many poor in England still need my help?" 
How impressive are the words of Jesus when he says 
to those men who had been under his tender protection 
in closest communion with him, ''Behold I send you 
forth as sheep in the midst of wolves." If their fellow- 
ship with Jesus had done anything for them, their 
hearts must have bounded with joy. In every act of 
worship which brings us into touch with Christ, with 
God, we are bound to hear, "Behold I send you forth." 
God is eternally going forth, and all who have loved 
him have caught his spirit and gone forth. A thousand 
souls sing hymns and say prayers in some great cathe- 
drals every Lord's Day. How marvelous would it be, 
if they might each day so worship that they might hear 
the voice of God, even with gladness, which sends them 
out to some great task. 

When there is not a special call to special work, 
there may be, and very often is, a new call to our 
daily task as a service as divine and sacred, as done 
ultimately not for ourselves but for others. We have 
an illustration in the reply of the cobbler, when his 
pastor asked him what he was doing for the kingdom 
of God, "I am mending these shoes for a school-boy 
so they will not leak," not mending them because he 
was to earn a dollar. God needs carpenters and black- 
smiths and teachers as surely as he needs deaconesses 

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THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

and missionaries. The development of his world on its 
material side is an essential part of his purpose. If 
he calls at all, he calls for tillers of the soil, for those 
who make and sell garments, and all the rest of the 
workers. Calls come from labor unions, employment 
agencies, employers, and for wholly selfish reasons men 
and women hear and obey the call to a work which as 
far as is possible is entirely detached from connection 
with the cross, redemption, the kingdom of heaven. 
It is indeed more than a benediction for a man at his 
daily task to know that he is a fellow-worker with the 
saints and heroes of all ages, the preachers, reformers, 
martyrs. A new touch will be given to each act of 
labor, new thoughts will fill his soul, and he will do his 
bit to acomplish the victory of the truth and the right. 
In turn the work will be a call to God, a struggling 
towards God, towards giving expression to the thought 
of God. The prayer of the heart for aid is spoken 
through the toil. The same energy which shows itself 
in the works of God, as they struggle towards perfec- 
tion through pain, is evident in the works of men, as 
they also strive to reach a divine ideal. Under such 
conditions one may indeed adore God, for there is the 
conviction that all that is done is obedience to God. 
But if it be supposed that life for the most part is my 
undertaking, under merely human regulations, certain 
it is that worship in any large sense will be impossible, 
for my obligation, my adoration is to a boss, to a capi- 
talistic system, to the distributer of the wages. 

The daily task is the material with which we give 
expression to the dreams or ideals of worship. The 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

season of worship will give a sight of these more or 
less material things as being thus shaped. And there 
is a great need for this, for most of us see it all from 
the standpoint of bread and meat, ambition, and power. 
Recently a young woman, who had spent twenty- 
thousand dollars on the training of her remarkable 
vo'ce, gave herself to the service of God in evangelistic 
work. This was quite noble and heroic, and many 
others might wisely do the same thing. But the ques- 
tion might very well be asked, if she might not have 
continued to sing before great audiences, to entertain 
them and to make for herself a livelihood, if these had 
not been made the supreme or final motives, and back 
of every concert had been the call of God. Does not 
God need men and women to do in a noble way what 
the bird with his sweet voice does, to add what the 
sunset glow adds to the monotony of our days of weari- 
ness? A very successful banker some years ago gave 
up his lucrative business and surrendered an accumu- 
lated fortune, in order that he might travel about the 
country as a layman preaching the kingdom. Again, it 
is not wrong, nor does it in any way discredit this rich 
man's sacrifice, to ask if he might not have remained 
in the banking business as a call from God and to 
the glory of God. There is great need for godly, gen- 
erous men of wealth, honest bankers, who think first 
of service, service to God and to their fellows. It is 
conceivable that a bank might be so run as to be like 
the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, and that 
an angelic well-trained voice might remind one of 

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THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

heaven, even when not for the moment used in h)nmns 
or anthems of the church. 

Socialism, bolshevism, and the Hke, are seeking the 
entire reorganization of the world, especially on its 
economic side, hoping to get rid of the menial, enslav- 
ing influence of work, as also to get much more of a 
material sort out of it. But what is after all needed 
is the divine reorganization, that reorganization or 
retouching which changes clouds into rainbows and 
the dull earth into a green sward. What the soul 
unconsciously demands is God himself, looking out 
from the midst of business as from between the wings 
of the cherubim. In some homes the piano is a piece 
of lumber sadly in the way, especially on the moving 
days, and in others the violin may become a plaything 
for the children for all kinds of imaginary purposes. 
How different if Josef Hoffman or Mischa Elman were 
there! The story is told of an old violinist who had 
come on bad days, that, walking down the street de- 
jected, he watched some dirty- faced children playing 
on a lot with a violin which he discovered to be a 
Stradivarius. He stood it as long as he could, and 
finally grabbing the instrument, he hurried away with 
it to his lonely room, and stretching strings on it, 
played all night long. Driven by his conscience, he 
returned it to the wretched house where he had found 
it, and playing on it, stirred to love of music and clean- 
liness the people to whom it belonged. This Hfe of 
ours needs Christ's hands ; that is all. The things which 
before seemed worthless or even in the way, give music 
to our soul$ and others. Certainly we shall not make 

[259] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

this a satisfactory world by simply tinkering with its 
material side and no more. If the efforts to drive 
God and all spiritual things out should succeed, this 
will be indeed a scene of despair. ^'Without God and 
without hope" — two terrific thoughts are these to- 
gether, but they must be found together always, if the 
visible things and they only are worth while. 

The aim of the Gospel is redemption, and that re- 
demption not of humanity merely, as though man must 
be snatched as a brand from the burning and the fire 
be allowed to burn on to total destruction. No; all 
that is must be redeemed. All things are to be recon- 
ciled to God. The groaning creation waits for the 
adoption. In Jesus Christ, through Jesus Christ, and 
unto Jesus Christ were all things created. They must 
needs be put back again and kept in their proper place. 
Do not deserts call upon us to make them fertile fields ? 
Are not rivers beseeching us to harness their energies 
in the service of mankind? Did not the oceans for 
long cry in vain that the narrow isthmuses ought not 
to keep them apart? In like manner, the marvelous 
forces utilized in manufacture and trade have begged 
to be made safe for even the weakest, until there should 
be no hurt or destruction there. It is a most thrilling 
experience if in the presence of a divine glory as 
dazzling as that which Isaiah saw, kneeling in the 
temple, some weary son of toil hears a summons to go 
back to his place, perhaps a very lowly one, into the 
conditions which at times have almost robbed him of 
his faith. No knight of the Round Table surely ever 
felt more honored in his task. The crusader's dream 

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THE CALL TO SPECLA.L SERVICE 

was small compared with his. This is the true home 
missionary. In some respects he reminds us of the 
pioneer of early days, riding through almost impene- 
trable forests, and swimming swollen streams, and 
facing wild beasts, to carry the Word of God and the 
knowledge of Jesus Christ. At the foot of the cross, 
the inspiration for his task is given him. 

A man may be so filled with God that every increase 
in his business but adds divine energy to his life, just as 
the increase in the coil of the wire multiplies the 
strength of the electric current which passes through 
it. Prosperity is then not a curse. Wealth may become 
an agency for righteousness. If only a whole nation 
were like this, it would be safe to lay more stress on 
material development, on railroads, mines, and ships. 
Paul teaches us that the gospel is the power of God 
unto salvation. It is perfectly legitimate for us, with 
the recollection of Paul's broad view of this great 
gospel, to think of all kinds of power as harnessed by 
the cross for human good. So may we think of a 
redeemed world, becoming a force for human re- 
demption, and increasingly so with the increase of its 
development and the enlargement of its resources. 
Such possibilities come only to those who have lingered 
long in the presence of God, who have heard very dis- 
tinctly the call, who have God's ideal for the world 
stamped indelibly on their hearts. In a recent magazine 
article, we have described to us most graphically the 
climb of a multitude of Hindoos, through snow and 
ice and jagged rocks, by most dangerous pathways, to 
a Sivaite shrine, where the bitter cold of the Himalayas 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

kept the water frozen into the obscene symbol of their 
worship. Shall we not climb the heights of fellow- 
ship with God, where seeing nothing but the cross of 
Jesus as the symbol of the divine will, we shall go back 
to the world of daily toil to make it effective there? 

There is a call to service growing out of the per- 
sonal contact with a God of sacrificial service revealed 
in the cross of Jesus Christ. Undoubtedly in our best 
hours of worship we think of this God. Outside we 
think of wisdom, power, glory, and perhaps go so far 
as to attribute selfishness to him. Here it is another 
God, who gave his only Son, who weeps over human, 
sorrow and sin, who says, "How can I give thee up?" 
and points us to Jesus, when we desire an answer to our 
fears, "This is my beloved Son, hear him." In the 
very act of worship all that is noble in us goes out after 
that cross. We are lifted up to that kind of an ideal. 
It is stamped on our very souls. You know how we 
are told that St. Francis lived in such loving contact 
with the crucified one, that the stigmata, the five 
wounds of Jesus, were reproduced in his body. These 
were external marks, but better are those other stig- 
mata marked on the inner life, and these must come to 
all who live in loving, sympathetic contact with the 
Man of Galilee. It is not the ordinary gaze upon the 
cross, even of an admiring sort, that brings the trans- 
formation. It is well known that painters who have 
given us famous paintings of the crucifixion have, at 
that very time, been living in sin and selfishness. There 
is needed the adoration by the whole man, an ecstatic 
reverence; all that is in us must center itself in our 

[262] 



THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

rapturous gaze in which all else is swallowed up — and 
this is worship. How numerous, almost commonplace 
are the illustrations growing out of relationships wholly 
human — of husbands and wives becoming strangely 
alike in looks, in tones of voice, in ideas ; pupils imitat- 
ing unconsciously even the defects of their teachers, 
as when Neander's students carried one shoulder higher 
than the other ; young preachers getting the very voice 
and gestures of some great preacher very influential in 
his day; children whose very walk at a distance down 
the street tells you who are their parents. We are 
reminded that they took knowledge of the disciples that 
they had been with Jesus and learned of him. No 
doubt they saw traces of his personality in the men 
who had been walking in such loving fellowship with 
him. How natural it seems to us when we are told 
that the primitive peoples, when they are led by the 
missionaries into the Christian life, imitate their every 
movement, and mode of dress, and manner of living 
down to the minutest detail. It reminds us of the 
reproduction in the baby's face of the mother's smiles 
and the movement of the mother's lips. 

There are travesties of all this in the seeking of pain 
and sacrifice for their own sake. Monks in the past, 
ambitious to have the stigmata like St. Francis on their 
bodies, have marked them there, painful as the experi- 
ence was, with their own hands. Men and women have 
gone through long vigils and fastings that they might 
seem to keep company with Jesus in his forty days of 
abstinence from food. Others in days of self-denial 
appointed by the church have been careful to do with- 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

out the things which they liked the most in order thus 
to be the more like their Lord. Indeed the cross has 
grown beautiful to us. We put it on our church spires, 
wear it bedecked with jewels on our bodies, weave it 
into our poetry and music and make it central in our 
pictures. Pain and suffering and self-denial are only 
the accompaniments of the real life of service, and are 
of value only as they may indicate the depth of our de- 
votion and the largeness of our service. Jesus and his 
disciples were criticized because they did not fast as did 
the disciples of John, and Jesus would not endure the 
cross until the proper time came, the time when he could 
no longer do his work without Gethsemane and Cal- 
vary. We cannot help admiring in a degree those who 
have seen such beauty in a life like the Master's that 
they have dressed themselves in the livery of it. But 
the call is to service to every form of human need, most 
of all to the needs of the soul, and this may lead to a 
season of feasting as in the case of the Master's visit to 
the home of Zaccheus. But no sacrifice, no pain can be 
so great as to excuse us from performing the service, 
whatever it may be. 

The sincere worship of God, apart from any im- 
mediate vision of the cross or the Victim slain there, 
brings forth in our lives the realization that we have 
some special task to perform for the world. It is seen 
in some of the great teachers of the ethnic religions. 
Numerous as were their errors, and defective and 
even at times harmful as were their ministrations, they 
longed for God, and, with the searching for him, out of 
their hearts invariably went their wish that they might 

[264] 



THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

do something for their brothers in the flesh. We see 
the same thing yet more evidently in the great heroes 
and saints of the Old Testament, in the wonderful ex- 
perience of Isaiah determined now to do what he can 
for his people of unclean lips, and in the strange story 
of iHosea and his faithless wife, who as he cast him- 
self almost in despair upon God, had waked up in him 
the determination to do what he could for that Israel, 
which, like his own wife, had been untrue to God. As 
the ideal musical without calls forth from its hiding 
place in us the musical within, so the ideal servant with- 
out awakes from its slumber the servant within us, that 
servant which after all is our true self. Indeed the very 
atmosphere about us is surcharged with the idea, the 
very music of bird and brook has in it this keynote; 
the movements of all things find here their harmony 
and order. If we but hush all other sounds and turn 
away from all other sights, we must realize ourselves 
to be under the spell of that which has been eternally 
true, but which in later days found its clearest expres- 
sion in the cross. Here is the one far-off divine event, 
to which the whole creation is moving, and we are in 
the great Gulf Stream of loving service which issues 
from under the throne of God and sweeps the universe 
around. It is almost impossible to resist its steady 
strong movement. Unconsciously to a large extent, 
and yet most certainly, the world is affected by this 
omnipresent, ever working God of service. 

Multitudes of so-called Christians, indulging in their 
sense of security through faith in Jesus Christ, remind 
us of the disciples as they go to sleep in the garden 

C265] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

while their Master faces the greatest task ever under- 
taken by God or man. It would appear to have been 
impossible for them to have rested, until Jesus had 
given them an immediate part in the work of redemp- 
tion. Living as we do in constant contact with the 
God of the cross, the God of service, and in a universe 
where all the forces operate under the command of such 
a God, we must fight against this supreme idea of love, 
unless we submit to it with all that it demands. Such 
battling does go on, and the results are seen in an en- 
feebled religious life and experience in individuals and 
in the church. Here is to be found the central place 
of obedience to God, and through this obedience God 
and all his resources become ours. But disobedience 
here makes impossible the bestowal upon us by God of 
his abounding grace. On the other hand, the more any 
church or any individual may do for the great needy 
world in utter self-forgetfulness, the more rapidly will 
the church grow in all those things of which a church 
is as a rule ambitious, and the more glorious will be the 
individual life. Said Jesus, "There is no man that hath 
left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, 
or wife, or children, or lands for my sake and the 
gospel's, but he shall receive an hundred-fold now in 
this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and moth- 
ers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in 
the world to come eternal life." 

In our worship we have fellowship with a goodly 
company who have heard the call to some special service 
and have obeyed. Some may be in that church where 
at that very time we sing and pray. They are in other 

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THE CALL TO SPECLA.L SERVICE 

(Churches and denominations of Christians in oiir own 
land. Thousands are engaged in many forms of mis- 
sionary endeavor in other lands. A multitude that no 
man can number who toiled in the kingdom of God and 
have entered upon their reward gather with us, for 

"Oiie family we dwell in Him, 

One church, above, beneath, 
Though now divided by the stream, 
The narrow stream, of death; 

One army of the living God, 

To His command we bow. 
Part of His host have crossed the flood. 

And part are crossing now." 

The eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
gives us quite a Hst of those who filled the places as- 
signed by God, and triumphantly lived the life of faith. 
What names and faces of Christian saints come before 
us out of the past remote and recent, until our concep- 
tion of the communion of saints means vastly more 
than the Holy Catholic Church. Here are Polycarp 
and Ignatius and Athanasius on down to Wesley and 
Livingstone and Carey. We grow strangely ashamed 
of our ease, our mere enjoyment of our religion, our 
very clothing and our food so much better than any of 
them had. Our longings for large comfort and larger 
wealth cease. We see them toiling in city slums, on 
mountain side, bearing the message to kings and gov- 
ernors, suffering the loss of all things in order to be 
co-workers with their Lord and we beg for a place by 
their side. 

Not merely does the voice of the crowd move us as 
by some hypnotic spell. It is the ideal life and character 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

of one man taking hold of the same elements in an- 
other man and awaking them to consciousness and 
activity. It is the giving of each to the other of certain 
essential personal traits, as illustrated in Paul's figure 
of the body with its many members each ministering 
helpfully to all the rest. Here is one great value in "the 
assembling of ourselves together." There is some- 
thing supernatural in the influence in this large sense 
of one life upon another, as supernatural, because it is 
of the same nature, as the influence of the life of God 
on a human soul. Miraculous is the power by which a 
mother reproduces herself in her son or daughter, by 
which a preacher lifts his people to his holy life, a gen- 
eral turns an army of weaklings and cowards into men 
of courage and strength. It was said of a certain very 
noble man, that men who proposed to live sinful lives 
dared not go near him, for fear they might be forced 
by his strange influence to give up their sins. What 
would happen to any of us if we should live for but a 
few days in a company of missionaries from the vari- 
ous fields of the world in loving admiring fellowship? 
Almost irresistible would be the inclination to continue 
in an association like this whithersoever it might lead. 
Even more influential is the unseen man. In his case 
also it was expedient that he should go away, so that 
his larger self, detached from all that is material and 
sensuous, might move upon the souls of others. These 
unseen lives are more real and inspiring to the sincere 
worshipers than the throng, comfortable and well- 
dressed, seated in the pews. They call us with an elo- 
quence like that of David Livingstone, in words he 

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THE CALL TO SPECL^lL SERVICE 

left written on a page near where he knelt dead in his 
tent, ''All I can say in my solitude is, may Heaven's 
rich blessing come down on every one — American, 
English, Turk — who will help to heal this open sore of 
the world." David Brainerd, after four years of labor 
amid indescribable discomforts and self-denials, died 
before he was thirty years of age, and it is said the 
simple record of his short Hfe has influenced more 
persons to give themselves to mission work than any 
other biography. These are our holy associations as 
we kneel in worship. 

When even a few — ^the Master's two or three — 
assemble for holy and unselfish purposes, it is the great 
essentials of our humanity which gather together. We 
may meet for political, or literary ends, or for the pur- 
pose of pleasure, entertainment, or fun. Here we meet 
on higher ground, the ground on which all that is 
secondary submits to that which is fundamental. 
Whatever be the subject engaging our attention, the 
assembly for the purpose of considering it strengthens 
its hold upon us, and will probably demand of us some 
form of expression. The world has fully learned the 
importance of this truth. We have clubs and other 
organizations for all sorts of aims both good and evil. 
A music study club will keep up the interest in the 
higher class of music. A political party, even in face 
of defeat, will continue to hold its meetings, to consider 
its principles and restore confidence in them. Certain 
social elements in a community will preserve the integ- 
rity of the refinement and culture for which they stand. 
The assembly in the church should do the same for 

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WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

the central things of the gospel, the cross and the con- 
secration to it. But is it not true that a multitude of 
things secondary interfere? Here are the societies, 
the mere raising of money in order to secure a certain 
sum, the preserving of our decency, the consideration 
of the rivalry of some church near by, belonging to 
our own or some other denomination. W^here the great 
eternal truths are considered in hymn and prayer and 
sermon and in the sacred fellowship, every hour that 
brings God's children together should witness the 
surrender of worshipers to the call of God. There 
should be no lack of workers for the ministry and 
other fields of labor. The present distressing situation 
shows how merely formal, how unreal, how void of the 
essential things are our seasons of prayer and com- 
munion in God's house. Do we indeed see the saints 
of all the ages bearing as they do *'the brands (stig- 
mata) of the Lord Jesus*'? We sing 

"We are traveling home to God 
In the way our fathers trod." 

There is danger that we shall think of this only 
in the light of what to them was orthodoxy or ideal 
ecclesiastical method. If this is all these ancient leaders 
of the church can do for us, they may be more of an 
injury to us than a blessing. Their orthodoxy and 
their method were simply means through which they 
gave expression to the eternal truths, means worth no 
more than the language through which we express our 
ideas, needing to be re-expressed or even translated 
with each new age. No, the way in which they trod, 

[270] 



THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

the only way worthy to be trodden by redeemed men, 
was the way of the cross, the way of sacrifice, the way 
of service. In their day they disagreed, they even 
quarreled about things which after all were small, as 
did Wesley with Whitefield and Toplady and Cennick, 
as did Luther with Zwingli, as did Kingsley with New- 
man, but these men walked in the way that Jesus 
walked, and they alike inspire us and call us to the 
heights, where they were transfigured with Jesus, as 
also to many lowly depths, where they so efficiently, in 
the spirit of the Master ministered to spiritual diseases 
which were supposed to be incurable. And these men 
all had their call straight from the Hps of God, with 
whom in perfect independence and liberty they had 
communion, along with many whom they admired, who 
had found God in other ages. They made mistakes. 
They often seemed to think that their Arminianism, 
Calvinism, consubstantiation, ecclesiasticism, were es- 
sential things, but it was through these, often in spite 
of these, they found God and their road to service and 
the cross. The trouble with their followers is that they 
too frequently are so busy with the non-essentials, they 
miss the essential things and even fail to see the heroes 
who lived so near the crucified Christ. 

It quite often comes to pass that when we go out into 
the world's concerns, we begin to distrust the vision and 
the call as impracticable. The hours of exaltation 
ought to control. Not the vision, but the world, is at 
fault, and the world must be made, so far as we are 
concerned, to conform to the vision. Our best mo- 
ments must be the norm by which all is to be tested. 

[271] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

If anything submits slowly, so much the worse for that 
thing. But it is a well known fact, though we may not 
often think of it, that the greatest deeds are frequently 
performed on the spur of the moment, or as the result 
of decisions thus made, and from which it is impos- 
sible honorably afterwards to recede. It is an evidence 
of unusual character and consecration, when in face of 
temptation and worldly ambition and opportunity, one 
follows the dream indulged in away from what men 
believe to be the realities of life. We read statements 
made of late that men who had felt a call to the min- 
istry and had entered upon their calling with high 
hopes have withdrawn, in the face of small salaries 
and high cost of living. Missionaries, sent forth with 
the blessing of throngs of admiring friends, have some- 
times suffered what was akin to disillusionment, as 
soon as they saw the people and the conditions in 
whose midst they must labor. Leaders in reforms 
grow weary of their task, when they find the public 
slow to respond to their appeals, and it may be are dis- 
couraged by the pulpit, the chief creator of public senti- 
ment. Was the vision an ignis fatuiis, a mirage ? Was 
the call the creation of their own fancy? Why make 
a sacrifice for nothing? It was fortunate for Paul that 
he did not have to go back at once, after his experience 
on the road to Damascus, to face his old employers of 
the Sanhedrin, that he went off to the quietness of 
Arabia to have other visions, and to have deepened 
the conviction that he had a call to the greatest work 
ever assigned a human being. 

We must go back to the vision. No doubt God will 
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THE CALL TO SPECIAL SERVICE 

repeat it for us in the very place where we first re- 
ceived it. We can verify it, look at it on every side, 
see the hand of God in it. In a way these visions and 
calls of God are eternal. They are always there await- 
ing us, if meant for us, and if they are genuine we 
shall always find them, if we seek them. It is true, as 
Bushnell has expressed it in a great sermon, that every 
man's life is a special plan of God. But what is the 
value of this fact, unless God has made known that 
plan? And there it is ever before us if we sincerely 
desire to knaw. There is the vision. This is the call. 
If we keep it before us, we shall become convinced at 
last it is meant for us. Certain it is that we shall 
never find this out by running away from it, by living 
in the world, by placing ourselves in positions which 
must blind our eyes to the vision and stop our ears to 
the call. Many of the details of the plan for our lives 
will be worked out after we have put our hands to 
the work appointed to us. Like Livingstone, we may 
know we are to be missionaries and give our lives to 
some Board in Christ's name. But we may find out 
that we did not choose the best field. We shall see 
the plan in all that is essental to it, although the details 
may be absent. 

When we have taken up our task in obedience to 
some heavenly vision, we should let God shed a new 
light upon it continually. We know what the sun 
can do with the world, how it hangs rainbows in the 
clouds and in the very midst of the terrors of Niagara, 
how it makes glorious in the west the approaches of the 
night, how it chases the darkness in the morning and 

[273] 



WHEN GOD AND MAN MEET 

makes splendid the mountain-peaks, which in the haze 
of the night looked hke grim spectres. God can make 
us see in those slum children in the city at home and 
in those negroes and yellow folks in the foreign lands 
his own dear children, until they assume all the beauty 
and attractiveness of Raphael's angels in the Sistine 
Madonna, or the glory of Moses and Elias in that 
same painter's transfiguration. We shall see our work, 
not detached, carried on alone, but a part of God's 
great plan. We shall know ourselves in partnership 
with him. The little plan of our lives now grows to 
be very great and important. And this will be true of 
our secular work as well. 

"Thine is the loom, the fort^e, the mart, 
The wealth of land and sea; 
The world of science and of art, 
Revealed and ruled by Thee." 

We must obtain God's estimate of the things which 
drew us from the vision and the call. These are the 
passing show not one fragment of which shall remain. 
They cover something substantial, eternal, divine, but 
this is the very thing which we miss. It is said that 
when Napoleon saw the pyramids, he asked some one 
standing near how long a marble statue would last, and 
then how long a painting, and when in each case the 
answer came, he replied with a sneer, "And yet we 
call that immortality." The mere money-making, glory 
of achievement, dazzle of beauty and of pleasure have 
no connection with God's eternal program. They are 
like the chaff which the wind drives away from the 
wheat or the marble dust which gathers about the door 

[274] 



THE CALL TO SPECML SERVICE 

of the artist's studio. They are to be carted away and 
dumped by God on the great ashheap of his universe. 
Jesus has left us his estimate of all such living in the 
fearful question asked the rich fool: "This night thy 
soul shall be required of thee. Then whose shall those 
things be which thou hast provided ?'* 

When we come to God for worship, then we do see 
again the vision and hear the call anew, then do we 
see the plan God has for us. Then is it that life's dull 
tasks are lighted with the glory of the divine face. 
Then do we behold the utter worthlessness of things 
we have so highly prized. A soul in constant touch 
with God cannot go astray, cannot miss his calling, 
cannot devise a plan of his own as a substitute for 
God's plan for him. He may hear a call to a hard 
piece of work, but he will feel confident that God's 
grace is sufficient, and he will be filled with mingled 
zest and joy. 



THE END 



[275] 



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